from Los Angeles
A tribute to Hollywood that risks bordering on a love letter to one of its most beloved stars: George Clooney.
Jay Kelly is the title of Noah Baumbach’s film, which after Venice will be broadcast on Netflix starting December 5, but it is also the name of the character played by Clooney, an actor and man in the midst of a crisis. In his sixties, famous and admired, George Clooney, or rather Jey Kelly, asked himself a question and for the first time in his life he found himself vulnerable: “My life doesn’t seem real – he said all my memories are just movies”.
A meeting with a colleague played by Billy Crudup reveals some uncomfortable truths and begins the protagonist’s journey of rediscovery. Little by little, the facade Kelly had built for herself, even lying to herself, crumbled. We find two daughters (Grace Edwards and Riley Keough) full of resentment towards their ever-absent parents and two collaborators (Adam Sandler and Laura Dern) who are equally miserable. Kelly has always put her career before everything and everyone. Not only was he absent from his daughter’s appearances, but he also forced his assistants to give up their personal lives. “A lot of people tell me: It’s like you’re playing with yourself, but no, I don’t feel like that,” said Clooney – “I don’t have the regrets that Kelly has. My kids are eight years old and right now they love me. I’m on good terms with everyone I work with, we respect each other. I have a very different life to her.”
The film begins with a scene on set, a scene that the actor asked to be allowed to reshoot. A theme that recurs frequently throughout the film and evokes the second possibility predicted by cinema and often denied by life. “We made the choice with the thought that there would be another chance – says the director – that later we would have the right to try again. The film talks about the moment in which we realized, in a way that was both clear and surprising, that we had only one attempt to make. That the first had to be good, there would be no other take”.
Jay Kelly, who has a melancholic appearance full of regret, now wants to be more present in the family, fostering friendship. But it was too late and he knew it. “What I’m interested in,” Clooney said, “is making Jay Kelly real and relatable to the audience, despite the fact that he’s a jerk.” The belated repentance and melancholy he feels when concluding a career built on going through life like a panzer, helps in this task, in the end Jey Kelly, like George Clooney, turns out to be likable.
“It’s an old school film, obviously the actors, a film about cinema and how actors never grow up. All we have to do is play.” In English play means game but also acting. It is also a film about the nostalgia of twentieth century cinema. The screenwriters – in addition to Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer also collaborated on the script, who also plays Kelly’s make-up artist – they honor it with homages to the great classics, from Federico Fellini to Alfred Hitchcock, but also with scenes taken from films in which Clooney himself starred in the past. “I wrote the film thinking about him and only he said Baumbach because with his face he managed to become a star in any era”.
His journey to reinvent himself will take Jay Kelly to one of Clooney’s favorite places in the world, Italy, where he will meet Alba Rohrwacher, Federico Scribani, Gianni Calchetti and
Giovanni Esposito. By the way: reports of the sale of villas on Lake Como are completely unfounded. “I also found out, when I read it in the newspaper, that I was going to sell the villa for 107 million. Not true.”
