Jay Kelly: It’s Not Blood. It’s Bolognese.

Cary Grant. Gary Cooper. Jay Kelly. A story about a movie star having an existential moment. Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. A moment. Or a few, to be fair.  

Jay Kelly (George Clooney basically playing a version of himself) bails on his latest film to chase his daughter across Europe. He's accompanied by an entourage, including a hair and makeup artist (co-writer Mortimer), a publicist (Laura Dern), and Ron, his long-suffering manager (Sandler).

Through backstory, we learn that Jay doesn’t have a great relationship with either of his daughters because he pursued a very successful film career. He is a bona fide movie star, albeit an aging one.

And even though the screenplay has a specific goal…join the younger daughter, Daisy, on her trip through Europe before she starts her own life and disappears from his, rendering him officially ‘alone,’ the screenplay is built around the main question: Who is Jay Kelly? I, for one, love scripts based on questions rather than goals. They tend to be more character-driven, so a character romp between Paris and Tuscany seemed like a great premise.

And to a degree it is. The central issue of the screenplay is the kind of midlife crisis that should be a great emotional ride. Instead, it's so carefully choreographed that one never quite feels the personal pain it's trying to explore. A screenplay about authenticity and emotional messiness needs to be authentic and dig deep. Jay Kelly feels safe and afraid of getting messy, which unfortunately makes the whole thing skid around the cracked surface without ever breaking the ice, dipping into freezing waters, and facing hypothermia.

If you find this analogy cheesy, you may be right, but I’m digging it and it’s my article, so it stays.

I think the biggest miss of this screenplay is the under-characterization of almost all characters. If this was done on purpose to show the shallow/hollow nature of the celebrity existence, it didn’t serve the story because it deprives it of a real emotional punch.

So who is Jay Kelly? We meet him through several key setups, first with an aging director, Peter Schneider (Broadbent), who gave him his first big break. And who is asking for Jay to lend his name to a film he’s trying to get off the ground, which Jay refuses. OK. Interesting. And unfortunately, it was not explored further because Peter dies. And Jay doesn’t struggle with any guilt over refusing the guy who launched his career.

At Peter’s funeral, Jay runs into his old acting buddy Tim (Crudup). At first, they reminisce about the good old times, but we soon learn that Tim holds a grudge because he thinks that Jay stole Tim’s role in the Schneider film. This leads to a fistfight, which then leads to a lawsuit. Juicy stuff, this. Which then unfortunately fizzles out when Ron later fixes it without much effort.

The daughters. Jessica, the older one, exists mainly in flashbacks and one phone call where she basically says, 'Yeah, I've dealt with you being absent, I'm over it.' That's her function: to tell Jay (and us) that he screwed up. Daisy, who Jay's literally chasing across Europe, registers as a plot device rather than a red-blooded character. We know she feels suffocated by Jay's parenting, but that's about it. She's the object he's pursuing, not much of a fleshed-out human with her own life.

Laura Dern's publicist gives us a little more setup, including hints of a romantic triangle with Jay and Ron, but then abruptly quits and leaves the movie. It's like the screenplay needed to clear the deck of complications.

These characters are not fully realized. They feel curated to help Jay’s journey, which might have even been OK if Jay Kelly had been fully realized.

The only character that seems to have a deeper dig is Ron, the long-time manager, who hopes he is Jay’s friend, only to be reminded that true friends don’t take 15%. He is subservient to Jay’s needs to such a degree that he bails out of a tennis match with his daughter at match point. He is the only character with some real complexity and personal stakes we can see and feel. Ron owns the quiet devastation that makes us feel the cost of spending your life managing someone else's life. His stakes are genuine because the screenplay lets him be messy in ways it never lets Jay be. To me, the screenplay accidentally focused on the wrong protagonist because Jay’s character is a catalyst for Ron’s transformation, growth…aka arc. Because he almost leaves at the end to focus on the fam.

Again, this is not a takedown. But a dig into what (for me) did and did not work in the script. Or more precisely, it's not that it did not work; it did not work enough, because it held back and was handled with a bit too much care. This is an enjoyable film with great dialogue and some killer lines. When Jay's acting teacher tells him, 'You're acting twice. Once when you play the part and again when you play yourself.' That's an observation. But the screenplay doesn't really do anything with it. It feels like great commentary without consequence.

The bar scene with Tim is another example. Tim's got some cutting lines, “Every time I pick up a magazine, I have to read about Jay Kelly and his amazing origin story... But they never wonder about the friend. The guy he took it from.” That stings. He adds, “You're not that important to me. You're important to other people en masse, maybe, but not to me.” Damn. That's the kind of line that should really mess Jay up, force him to confront some uncomfortable issues. But the screenplay soon reveals that Tim's got his own sketchy past, which neutralizes his moral authority. We don't get to sit with Jay's guilt because the screenplay gives us an out. Too bad.

The story ends with a career tribute for Jay somewhere in Tuscany. He even invites his gruff and disapproving dad (Keach). When Dad slips and falls and ends up with red splatter over his shirt, Jay asks, “Is this blood?” The answer is, “It’s bolognese.” To me, this is the perfect metaphor for the story. Lots of Bolognese, not enough blood.

I have been a fan of Noah Baumbach’s scripts and films ever since I saw The Squid and the Whale. Talk about not holding back and getting messy. Too bad that some of that type of messiness didn’t spill into Jay Kelly.

Writers: Emily Mortimer and Noah Baumbach

Director:  Noah Baumbach