Jay Kelly: Melancholy, memory and regret in George Clooney’s movie star drama

George Clooney plays a movie star. George Clooney is a movie star.

The two concepts are inseparable, and it’s what makes Jay Kelly such a curious film, one which plays with the real Clooney’s place in the wider culture to fuel his fictional character’s legacy.

Who better to play a world-famous movie star looking back at his career and his choices than one of the most recognisable faces in the world? One of the last movie stars.

“It’s funny, now that I see the movie, I understand why people feel like it’s a mind meld,” Clooney told The Nightly. “But when I read the script, I thought there was a huge difference between the two of us.”

Clooney is not Jay, not exactly. Jay is a man filled with regret over prioritising his career over time spent with his two daughters. But the film weaponises Clooney’s 40 years on screen to evoke the parasocial relationship audiences have with him and to his work.

There’s even a montage of Clooney’s performances, standing in for Jay’s at an emotionally climactic moment. We feel attached to Jay because we are attached to Clooney. It’s inescapable.

Directed by Noah Baumbach from a script he wrote with Emily Mortimer, Jay Kelly is a film that brims with melancholy and memory, focused on Jay but also channelled through its ensemble of characters played by the likes of Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Stacy Keach, Alba Rohrwacher and Mortimer.

After wrapping his latest film, provoked by the death of a former mentor (Jim Broadbent) and a confrontation with a former friend (Crudup), Jay decides to chase his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards) across Europe.

He thinks it’s his last chance to spend time with her before she leaves home for university, and it emerges this is driven in part because of his fractured relationship with his older daughter (Keough).

Over the objections of his entourage, including manager Ron (Sandler) and publicist Liz (Dern), he drags his retinue to Paris, only to discover Grace has hopped a train to Italy.

Jay Kelly, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is in cinemas this week, is a road-trip movie that’s constantly on the move, including an extended sequence on the train without any first-class or private cabins, as a metaphor for how he’s constantly on the run, away from and towards something.

As Jay moves towards his destination, a film festival in Italy where he is being presented with a lifetime achievement honour, he’s also looking back, at moments in his life that formed who he is.

Making a film like Jay Kelly triggered for Clooney “this idea of ‘don’t wake up at 64 years old and wish you had tried something’,” he said.

“A huge part of the film is the road not travelled, and you didn’t spend enough time with your kids, you didn’t help out your friends.

“So, it was very much a part of what I saw in this was the lesson to make sure that you are trying to balance work with family a little bit better because your tendency is just to put your head down and go to work.”

For at least a decade now, Clooney appears to be as much the family man as he is a Hollywood star. He married human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2014, and with their twins, Ella and Alexander, live primarily on a farm in France.

Unlike Jay, whose closest friend is his manager Ron, Clooney is surrounded by family, and he lives largely out of the spotlight except when he chooses to stick his head out.

He feels OK with the choices he’s made. “It’s kind of cheating with me because everything happened for me in my career later in life than it does for most people,” he said. “ER happened when I was 33 years old.

“When you’re older and have failed at a lot, you’re better prepared to address success. I was in a little better position than I think a lot of people are.”

It took two decades for Clooney and Baumbach to come together. In 2005, Clooney was promoting Good Night, and Good Luck, the second movie he directed, when at the same time Baumbach was on the press and awards circuit with The Squid and the Whale.

“We were kind of bouncing around together and I said to him, ‘Hire (me) as an actor, dude’, and it took 20 years but I’m going to let him off the hook,” Clooney said.

By his own admission, Baumbach makes personal films. The Squid and the Whale, drawn from Baumbach’s experiences as a teenager going through his parents’ separation, was one. His wrenching divorce film, Marriage Story, was another, inspired by his split from Jennifer Jason Leigh.

While Baumbach isn’t a movie star like Clooney, there is a universality to looking back and wondering if you this is the life you should have had, and how we consider, reconsider and remember the past.

“All of our memories are construction anyway. So, thinking about movies and movies being constructions, so in a sense I’m making movies that are constructing certain aspects of either things in my life, or things in other people’s lives, people I know,” Baumbach said.

Dern pointed out that while Jay Kelly specifically uses the figure of a movie star as a “perfect symbol or allegory for narcissism or lack of awareness”, Jay’s regrets are everyone’s.

“None of us want to miss our own lives while we’re trying to achieve these commitments we’ve made,” she said. “The more people are seeing it, the more I’m hearing how radically relatable it is.”

Dern, who was speaking at the Venice Film Festival in September before the death of her mother Diane Ladd, said, “My personal experience is I was raised by actors, and with all the respect in the world to my mum, you didn’t get to bring your daughter to a movie set. Back then, you had to leave for four months to go make a movie.

“It was really tough. I think that’s been a big drive for me, which has been, ‘how do I balance this’ and ‘how do I make my family a priority’?”

Crudup added that from the start of his career, he made sacrifices, he missed weddings, funerals and other seminal life moments. “At a certain point, if you have any agency, you start trying to insist on being able to go to the weddings,” he said.

“This is such a strange job,” Mortimer added. “You go far away from the people you love, sometimes to pretend to love other people. It’s strange.”

Sandler, whose performance as the loyal and sensitive Ron has put him in the Oscar conversation again, said that, yes, it’s hard, but there’s no part of him that wishes he had a “normal” life.

“I’ve loved my life,” he said.

“There’s nothing I would change. But do you look back at life and say, like anybody who works for a living, ‘man, I had to work hard that day and I missed out on this Little League game’? Of course.

“There are lots of that that’s painful. But not everybody gets to say, ‘I’m taking next week off’. Everybody works hard, and you just try to cram it all in. That’s why we all have bags under our eyes.”

The film industry is a particular beast for those within it, but for audiences, it’s magic. It’s why Baumbach’s encapsulation of regret, memories and movies in Jay Kelly is so synchronous.

Jay Kelly is a film that loves movies. There’s another line in it, “all my memories are movies”, that evoke the romanticism of the big screen and the indelible mark it’s left in our lives.

“For all of us who love movies and grew up loving movies, we all have our relationships from our lives,” Baumbach said. “You remember where you were when you saw Star Wars.”

Sandler chimed in, “When I see something on TV accidentally, one of my older movies, I immediately think of the time (we made it), who was there, where it was, how much fun we had, what went wrong.”

The melancholy in Jay Kelly isn’t just carried by its characters. The whole film is a nostalgia piece for something that almost no longer exists.

Going to the movies is becoming rarer, and there are questions as to whether we’re even mounting a new generation of movie stars. The film is called Jay Kelly because his name alone means something in its fictional world.

What about now, when “Jurassic Park” has more meaning than “Scarlett Johansson”? Is someone like Timothee Chalamet enough of a draw to open a movie or did audiences only flock to Dune because it was Dune?

“I would argue that the last generation of proper movie stars that opened movies was (Robert) Redford and (Paul) Newman and that era,” Clooney said. “Since then, the vehicle itself was as big as the movie. It’s changed.

“Having said that, after doing ER, I was under contract to Warner Brothers and had a five-picture deal, and they sort of protect you and they put you in films and helped your career along. That doesn’t exist so much right now. Some of that is gone.

“But there’s so much more work for actors than when I was young, by a factor of 10 times. There’s a lot of work for actors and they’re probably not as big (a name) but we, Brad (Pitt) and I, weren’t as big as Redford and Newman and (Gregory) Peck and all of those guys either.”

Clooney might be humbling himself to suggest he and Pitt are not movie stars of the same ilk as Redford. But even Clooney’s era is passing. It’s the small screen’s now.

There’s an irony then, perhaps, that Jay Kelly is being financed by Netflix. The film is being released into cinemas for a short window – two weeks in Australia, from today – before it hits streaming, and in some international cities, will be shown in historic picture houses.

But maybe the nostalgia of the film will inspire audiences to consider what future regrets they might have if cinemas go the way of movie stars.

Baumbach still believes in the magic of movies.

“There is a longing in cinema for the importance of cinema and the importance of movie stars,” he said. “It wasn’t something I think we felt like we needed to highlight. But it’s like a western, and westerns are always about the end of a certain America and the beginning of another.

“Anybody watching this movie is going to have this feeling, it’s going to be associated with it no matter what. That is a tribute to all that.”

Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and on Netflix from December 5