Jay Kelly: A Review - George Clooney as George Clooney in an Underwhelming George Clooney Film

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you love the George Clooney Experience, you’ll find this harmless and rather hapless film to be a pleasant experience…if Clooney is not your cup of tea, this lukewarm gruel will go down like bad milk.

Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, is a dramedy that tells the story of a somewhat fictional actor - considered the last of the great Hollywood movie stars, coming to grips with his life and career.

The film, written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer and directed by Baumbach, premiered on Netflix on December 5th.

Jay Kelly is essentially A Christmas Carol for the Hollywood sect, as it’s the tale of a Hollywood star having an existential crisis being visited by the ghosts of his Hollywood past and present…and maybe future.

The film masquerades as a search for profundity but is actually a cloying and treacly exercise in mawkishness wrapped in self-pitying movie star charm and insider winks.

Jay Kelly is no doubt designed to elicit knowing nods and hopefully some nominations from the movie industry insiders it dramatizes and humanizes – a wise strategic maneuver by both Baumbach and Clooney as the narcissism capitol of the world - Hollywood loves, nothing more than movies about itself. The problem though is that I don’t think Jay Kelly is going to win any Oscars despite its narrative pandering, mostly because it just isn’t particularly good.

The film is sort of a poor man’s attempt at Robert Altman. It would be too generous to call it Altman-esque, or even Altman-lite…but let’s just say it has some stylistic flourishes – in the party and group scenes for instance, that somewhat resemble the work of Robert Altman.

The structure of Jay Kelly, which features a series of flashbacks, is less than compelling. Watching Clooney watch an actor play a younger version of himself is amateurish at best, and ridiculous at worst.

The film is also deeply marinated in a saccharine sentimentality that irritates. Jay Kelly is, besides being a movie star, a bad father, bad friend and overall bad person…so this story is reduced to “poor little rich boy feels bad”.

The same is true of Adam Sandler’s character – Ron, who is Jay’s manager and he apparently really “loves” him…but this love never seems earned or genuine despite it being told to the audience over and over that it is.

In this way the snake pit that is Hollywood is glossed over in favor of a sort of silly and goofy take on the truly vile villains who inhabit the place – who actually see human beings as nothing more than pieces of meat to exploit for personal profit, rather than as “members of the family”.

George Clooney has at times been called the last movie star – a label I would vociferously argue against (that title might go to Leonardo DiCaprio – but maybe not even him), so his playing essentially a version of himself – or at least a version of his public self, is a mildly intriguing premise.

Clooney’s career, or more particularly, his movie stardom, has always been a mystery to me. I understand that he is a good-looking and charming guy, but he isn’t that good-looking or that charming to have become the massive movie star he did.

The truth is that Clooney is not a very good actor (and don’t get me started on Clooney as director - YIKES!). The proof of this is easily discovered if you watch the plethora of movies he’s made – most of which are pretty sub-par too. Instead of listing the cavalcade of films he’s made that stink, I’ll just list the ones worth seeing – a much more manageable list. Three Kings, Michael Clayton, The American…that’s it, that’s the list.

That Clooney, a talent-deficient, pseudo-nepo baby (his aunt is Rosemary Clooney), could go from being a two-bit tv actor to a movie star seemingly overnight speaks to something broken in the system…and Clooney’s massive failing over the last decade or more a symptom of the disease of sub-mediocrity ravaging Hollywood.

Clooney’s lone super power appears to be his unrelenting ambition – how American of him. In some ways he is, and he will shudder at this comparison – the Hollywood version of Donald Trump…all hat and no cattle so to speak.

Perusing Clooney’s filmography – which shows that over the last dozen years he hasn’t made a single relevant film, reveals that whether his star status was ever earned or not – it is certainly now hemorrhaging…and Jay Kelly is a last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding.

In some ways Jay Kelly succeeds in being a tourniquet, a short-term fix to temporarily stop the bleeding. Clooney, who always seems to play himself in films, once again plays himself – an aging movie star adored for being a charming fellow who plays himself…sort of like a mirror reflected into a mirror reflected into a mirror and on and on. Admittedly…that is very clever.

Clooney does Clooney things throughout…he smirks and tilts his head and does a bunch of silly running (a cloying Clooney signature). But here’s the thing about Clooney’s “charming” performance…it is demonstrably better than the movie surrounding him.

Baumbach struggles to find a coherent tone and a coherent narrative throughout, but there are a bevy of sequences which are baffling in both their creation and execution. For example, there’s a train sequence that is so awful it made my teeth hurt. There’s also a bizarre side story regarding an old classmate that could have been something but was turned into absolutely nothing. The same is true of a long lost love interest.

And then there is Adam Sandler. Sandler plays Jay’s manager Ron. Ron is the picture of patience and thoughtfulness. He has a wife and kids at home that he doesn’t spend enough time with because he is always doing stuff for Jay Kelly. He even neglects his other clients because he has to handle Jay Kelly.

Sandler is, at best, grating in the role. But to be fair, I find Adam Sandler grating every time I see him. Sandler, like Clooney, is a star whose success I find to be a complete and utter mystery. He isn’t funny, he isn’t interesting, he isn’t talented and he isn’t original. He is a waste of space, so much so that if it were up to me - he’d be melted down and we’d start over from scratch.

Sandler does his usual schmaltzy shtick of soft talking and sad eyes as Ron, and it hits with about as much dramatic power as a week-old dog turd baking by the side of the road.

As off-putting as Sandler is, the real problem with Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach. Baumbach has made some interesting films in his time – and by some, I mean two…The Squid and the Whale and While We’re Young.

Baumbach isn’t a visual stylist, he’s more of a wordsmith…but the problem is he’s not that good of a writer. His stories are more often than not narratively trite and reek of an arthouse desperation that feels palpably mainstream in its execution. In other words, Baumbach is an arthouse poseur, who makes third-rate, middlebrow muck for the masses while pretending to be an cool-kid auteur.

Jay Kelly is not the worst film ever made. It has a certain charm about it, which is probably the same undefinable charm that has kept George Clooney on the A-list in Hollywood for the last twenty-five years or so.

Some people will love Jay Kelly as it is lukewarm pablum that can be digested with ease and little effort. I am not one of those people.

That said, if you are looking to spend a breezy two-hours and twelve minutes with George Clooney being George Clooney pretending to have an existential crisis…then I genuinely think you’ll enjoy Jay Kelly and encourage you to check it out as it is harmless enough.

As for me…if I ever get the urge to watch George Clooney…I’ll rewatch The American or Michael Clayton…thank you very much.

©2025

White Noise: A Review - Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unconscionably boring and banal, poorly written, directed and acted movie. I’d rather die in an airborne toxic event than watch this movie again. Go read the book instead.

It has been said that White Noise, Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 postmodern novel, was unfilmable, and now with Noah Baumbach’s flaccid cinematic adaptation now streaming on Netflix, that assertion has been proven true.

At the very end of Baumbach’s brutally boring and banal White Noise something miraculous occurs. After enduring two-hours and sixteen minutes of the most middling of middlebrow and mundane moviemaking, the film ends with all of the characters doing a choreographed dance sequence in a supermarket to a new LCD Soundsystem song while the credits roll. This credit rolling scene pulsates with the wit, vitality, frivolity and vibrancy that is entirely devoid from the film that precedes it, and highlights the glory of what could have been.

White Noise stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, and tells the story of Jack Gladney (Driver), a professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, his wife Babette (Gerwig) and their four kids as they navigate life and contemplate death in 1980’s America.

The book is a clever postmodern meditation on existentialism amidst the controlling and conformist nature of America’s toxic, pre-packaged consumerist culture. Baumbach’s movie though is so poorly written, directed and acted that it barely scrapes the surface of those meaty topics and ends up being little more than an arthouse version of one of those Are We There Yet? movies starring Ice Cube.

Baumbach’s film tries to be an incisive satire of the 80’s, but ends up being an insufferable, self-indulgent, instantaneously forgettable piece of work largely due to a script that’s intolerably verbose with contrived dialogue that feels dramatically lethargic, if not leaden.

Baumbach’s decision to makes some changes to DeLillo’s novel, like adding a silly car chase scene and injecting Babette into the climactic sequence, not only dumbs down the material but is actively at cross-purposes with the drama and tone of the story.

The car chase in particular is cringe-worthy. The car mishap and drive through the river and woods that leads to a jump into a field is the most hackneyed, inane, embarrassing thing any filmmaker has done this year…and I say that having seen Amsterdam.

The fact that Baumbach added the car chase and yet cut from the film the scene in the book where Jack’s youngest son Wilder goes on a perilous and harrowing big wheel journey, is pretty telling of the kind of director he is…which is spineless and sackless.

To Baumbach’s credit, the credit rolling dance sequence really is infectiously enjoyable, as is a scene mid-film where Jack and fellow professor Murray co-lecture a class about Hitler and Elvis in a sort of dueling intellectual dance. Those two scenes are literally the only things that are remotely watchable in White Noise, and beg the question, why didn’t Baumbach make the whole film with that type of absurdist energy?

And I suppose it’s also to Baumbach’s credit that he attempts some ambitious things on White Noise, like using a few 360-degree shots, and imitating/paying homage to different directors, like Spielberg – whom he imitates by injecting some controlled familial messiness ala early Spielberg, or Robert Altman, whom he copies by having overlapping dialogue and conversations throughout scenes.

Unfortunately, Baumbach’s Spielbergian familial messiness feels a little too contrived and manufactured and his Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes feel unintelligible, cluttered and irritating because they’re undermined by subpar sound design and Netflix’s notoriously poor audio quality.

Baumbach is adored by critics but I find his filmography to be hit or miss…mostly miss. I liked the flawed The Squid and the Whale, and found While We’re Young to be amusing, but everything else is odious dogshit masquerading as arthouse gold. A perfect example was Marriage Story, Baumbach’s last film – which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay despite being an absolutely heinous, heaping pile of flaming garbage.

Baumbach’s films are usually much smaller in terms of scope, scale and budget than White Noise. This movie has a reported budget of $100 million, with some reports stating $140 million, and Baumbach doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The film looks paper-thin and unconscionably cheap, with the exception being the gloriously staged supermarket with its spot-on color scheme and period proper pricing and products.

Maybe the budget went to the cast, but if so, that was a huge waste of money.

Adam Driver is horribly miscast as the lead Jack Gladney and gives an absolutely dreadful performance. Driver, like Baumbach, is a critical darling, but pinning down why exactly people think he’s a good actor is as elusive as getting a hug from Bigfoot – a role I’d actually like to see Driver play because then you wouldn’t see him much and when you did, he’d be hidden under make up and hopefully wouldn’t talk.

Greta Gerwig is another critical darling, and she’s in a long-term relationship with Baumbach, so they’re sort of the critical darling couple of American cinema. Gerwig plays Jack’s wife Babette and is abysmal in the role. Gerwig is nothing, she’s a dead-eyed, empty vessel entirely devoid of any gravitas or inner life. She’s like a tumbleweed rolling through scenes with no grounding and no life.

The rest of the cast are equally lifeless and/or underused.

Don Cheadle is never given enough to do. Andre Benjamin is a glorified extra. Poor Raffey Cassidy is distracting because she looks like a trans Harry Potter.

White Noise claims it is an “absurdist comedy drama”, but while the absurdity is self-evident, the comedy and drama are non-existent. There is nothing interesting, insightful, amusing or engaging in this entire two-hour and sixteen-minute venture except for the fun music video at the end.

If you’ve read the DeLillo book you’ll be entirely underwhelmed by Baumbach’s movie adaptation, as it loses everything in translation. If you’ve not read the book, you’ll be bored out of your mind watching Baumbach’s movie, not to mention completely lost in terms of its incomprehensible and incoherent plot.

The bottom line is that Baumbach’s White Noise is just another in a long line of directorial disappointments over the last few years in the world of cinema. The cinematic drought since 2019 is real and feels like it might even be getting worse.

I hope 2023 marks a turn-around for the art of cinema, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that just when you think movies have hit bottom, and 2022 sure feels like the bottom, there’s always some deeper level of hell for things to fall to.

So, skip White Noise on Netflix as it’s a total waste of time, but if you’re interested maybe pick up DeLillo’s book and give it a read instead. It’s not transformational, but it is, unlike the movie, amusing. That’s how bad movies have gotten, I’m now recommending you go read a book. God help us all.

©2023