WARNING: SPOILERS

I didn’t believe it enough.

Yes, I believed everyone in his entourage would drop everything to follow the sad whims of movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney), since they’re in his employ, and moths to flames and all that; but I didn’t get why, within days, they would each abandon him. Everything else was the same and he hadn’t acted awful in the interim. Hadn’t he even caught a purse snatcher? Kinda? But they all fall away because that’s the movie’s trajectory, things falling away, until our guy winds up alone in the woods, the European woods, the dark fairytale forests of our childhood imaginations, even if all that falling away doesn’t make much sense.

Back in college, I thought up a short story along those exact lines: a group of friends heading out for the night, to a party they can't find, and one by one falling away until it was just our protagonist, alone, with nowhere to go. I didn’t write it.

Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” is a work-life balance movie, but for the title character it’s never in balance. He loves work and is bad at relationships. People around him are either looming up and talking incessantly, or they’re pulling away, bitter. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz. Everyone wants a piece of you until they don’t get it.

Nothing’s in balance with Jay’s two daughters. While Jessica (Riley Keogh), the special-needs teacher, feels abandoned from way back when, Daisy (Grace Edwards), the recent high-school grad, feels smothered in the right now. That’s the sad whim—pursuing Daisy onto a train in France. It’s like he’s making up Jessica’s deficit with Daisy’s abundance. Bad idea. I also found both daughters annoying, particularly the younger and more privileged. Her first line to her father is “I’m smarter than you,” and I wanted him to say something like, “You know who wouldn’t say that? Someone smarter than me”—the way that Clooney once said “You’re about 100 miles from smart” in another, better movie. But this movie isn’t that smart.

Clooney and I are almost the same age—he was born a week after my older brother, in May 1961—and a man sifting through the regrets of his life, well, that’s my wheelhouse. I’m your target audience. But the movie keeps falling short. It keeps delivering scenes I don’t buy or don’t care about.

I’m beginning to think Noah Baumbach and I will never make it as a couple.

Can we go again?
It’s not a bad open, the final days of a movie shoot, with the protagonist, Jay Kelly, wounded in the shadow of a NYC bridge, saying, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave the party.” The actor is the opposite. They yell cut and print but he says to the director, “Can we go again? I’d like another one.” Apparently Kelly is famous/infamous for not being able to leave productions. Maybe he doesn’t want to return to his life.

Then we return to his life—the “I’m smarter than you” scene as he skims his backyard pool—after which he learns that Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), the director who gave him his first big break, has died, and Kelly flashes back on the last time they met. Schneider is old, down on his luck, and wants Kelly to lend his name to a new production but Kelly won’t. He won’t help a friend to whom he owes everything, and that friend is now dead. And now it’s the funeral. I expected comeuppance, but no, he’s greeted well by family. He’s welcomed.

The comeuppance comes a scene later. In the parking lot, he runs into an old roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup), and the two go to a bar, and what starts out as pleasant but unequal reminiscing—since Jay is where he is, and Timothy isn’t—quickly turns to animosity. Timothy has resentments. Any story about the story of Jay Kelly includes the scene where he accompanies a friend to an audition for a Peter Schneider film and he winds up with the part—and the career! How about that? Well, Timothy is the friend and he’s got 40 years worth of animosity to vent. He feels that Jay Kelly stole his career, and his girl, and the moment Timothy decides to go for it, to punch Jay in the face, the look in his eyes is truly scary. Kudos, Mr. Crudup.

It's after this incident that Jay Kelly tells his entourage they’re going to Europe to follow Daisy and maybe pick up that award in Tuscany his manager, Ron Sukenik (Adam Sandler), wants him to get.

The entourage includes Ron, as well as publicist Liz (Laura Dern), and it’s revealed the two nearly had a thing together. These days he’s always on the phone with wife and kids, everyone Southern California-spoiled, but he nearly had the other. The true thing? Or just another thing? Who knows?

What kept them apart is the need to be there for Jay, and that’s not a bad exploration, but it feels like it would be exploration in a movie called “Ron Sukenik”—or maybe in a movie called “Jay Kelly” if the main character was Ron Sukenik. That’s not this. But they keep having to go to Jay, to prop him up, because there’s a sense he can’t handle the world. Even the trip to the bar with Timothy. Should we let him go? Does he know how to pay for things? Ron keeps calling him “puppy” because that’s what he is.

I just kept waiting for something like wisdom. It was a bad idea to follow Daisy, but I like the reaction when he shows up in her train car: she’s annoyed, betrayed, while the French dude/wannabe filmmaker she’s snogging is agog. Because it’s Jay Kelly. That’s everyone. They’re all agog, and he’s there, and it’s not much. Is that the point? “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?” says a snooty girl on the train. “You know how difficult it is to be yourself? You try it.” That was someone else’s line, decades earlier, but Jay repeats it here. Same way he took Timothy’s improvisation and made it his own in front of Peter Schneider. All the best lines are somebody else’s; he just reads them.

I like the train bathroom where he keeps repeating his name, along with the names of other great Hollywood actors. I wanted it to lead somewhere.

And why that name, by the way? That plainness. JK? His rival gets Alcock. You don’t need to be Freud for that one. I was hoping Alcock would be a Brad Pitt cameo but Patrick Wilson is fine in the role.

The Crest
You know when the movie became magical? At the end, in Tuscany, in that old operatic theater layered like a wedding cake, when they show scenes from Jay Kelly’s movies. Because they’re actually scenes from George Clooney’s movies: “Thin Red Line,” “Up in the Air,” et al. It’s the magic of movies. Maybe that’s part of it. Jay Kelly is a pain but look at the magic he makes.

I’m glad Patricia and I went to see it at an actual movie theater, the Crest in Shoreline, the last of the Landmark chain in town. All the jobs are one now—you buy the ticket from the guy who sells you your popcorn, who tears the ticket, etc.—but it’s hanging on. The theater smells old, the audience was older, and a moth, an actual moth, kept flitting in front of the screen during the show, but it’s hanging on. Not a wedding-cake theater but still there. 

It's been a while since I’d seen a George Clooney movie. He’s such an omnipresent cultural figure that it’s easy to look track sometimes, but I think the last time I saw him on the screen was “Hail, Caesar!” in 2016. Another role where he plays an actor. Back then he was making everything everywhere all at once—“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Syrianna,” “Michael Clayton,” “Burn After Reading,” “Up in the Air,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Descendants,” “Gravity,” boom boom boom—plus his own directing efforts, all during a 10-year run. And then, poof, not. Where did he go? Where did I go? Can’t believe we didn’t stay in touch. We should work harder at staying in touch. We're not getting any younger.