George Clooney‘s Netflix comedy Jay Kelly launched at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday evening and critics are starting to weigh in.
Noah Baumbach‘s new film follows a famous movie actor named Jay Kelly (Clooney) and his devoted manager Ron (Adam Sandler) as they embark on a whirlwind and unexpectedly profound journey through Europe. Along the way, both men are forced to confront the choices they’ve made, the relationships with their loved ones and the legacies they’ll leave behind.
Written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, the film’s ensemble also includes Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Riley Keough.
The critical response so far has skewed positive, with many praising Clooney and Sandler. On the flip side, a couple of outlets have remarked that the film falls on the “soft” side, and one UK national publication had some particularly stinging words.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond was positive, saying the film, whose subject and tone harkens to some bona fide movie classics, “manages to find its own identity in the movies-about-movies genre, making it fresh, smart and quite welcome.”
He adds of the actors: Clooney “does some of his best screen acting in this film, which offers a tricky role for a genuine modern movie star. … Sandler is simply great as the suffering Ron, whose life is so intertwined in Jay’s that he has to break loose and reclaim his own identity. I know a few Rons in this business, and Sandler nails it. So does Dern, who is completely convincing as a personal publicist at wit’s end. She obviously has been around a few in her time.”
In Screen International, Tim Grierson also appreciates Clooney’s performance, saying his “old-school Hollywood handsomeness, paired with the vulnerability he brought to dramas like The Descendants, allows Jay to be a fascinatingly complex shallow person.” He did note that “the film’s measured perspective on Jay occasionally gets interrupted by an uneven comedic tone, as well as Baumbach’s underdeveloped interest in other characters.”
Bilge Ebiri at Vulture says Clooney “delivers the performance of a lifetime,” and The Independent glows about the actor: “Clooney seldom strays too far in his movies from his long-established persona as the handsome everyman. However, if he is playing yet another variation on himself in Jay Kelly, at least he’s doing so in a far more raw and revealing way than he has ever done before. That’s why a film that looks in its early scenes as if it’s going to be unbearably smug ultimately tugs so hard on the heartstrings.”
On the other side, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a lowly one out of five stars, saying the pic “pirouettes into territory already trodden by Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, but smothers everything in a bland, Tuscan sunshine-syrup. The sharp realisations about the cruelty of show business are cancelled by gushes of Hollywood self-adoration and self-forgiveness and jokey non-comedy.”
That came after he said that despite’s Clooney’s rightful popularity as an actor, “in this dire, sentimental and self-indulgent film, he has the look of a man who has found strychnine in his Nespresso pod and can’t remember which of the cupboards in his luxury hotel suite contains the antidote.”
Conversely, The Wrap says Clooney is “damn good at playing a pampered movie star”: “Noah Baumbach is back to nailing that tricky balance with a film that moves like a comedy but has a lot on its mind.”
Loud and Clear is also a fan giving the movie five stars out of five: “Clooney, Crudup and Sandler excel in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which teaches us to embrace our illusions because it’s all we have.”
IndieWire gave the film a B- score, calling it “soft and sad” and declaring that “Noah Baumbach’s uncharacteristically sentimental shortfaller gets lost on its way to a movie script ending.”
Clooney had to miss the Venice press conference and press duties earlier Thursday due to what the festival described as a “bad sinus infection.” He did, however, attend tonight’s world premiere at the Sala Grande.
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