JAY KELLY FAILS TO SEE GEORGE CLOONEY

Jay Kelly follows a man on a collision course with an ending that he hasn’t laid the groundwork for. It’s also a movie about George Clooney (Ocean’s Eleven, Batman Forever), who I adore as a performer and star. Unfortunately, like the infamous story of Robert Redford testing for The Graduate, Clooney’s personal history feels at odds with the material.

He’s doing some of the best work in his career in scenes where he does what I love to call “The Sammy Fableman stare,” but he and the film don’t quite deliver on the undercurrent of wistfulness that full-bodied regret brings with it. I cannot help but wonder what the film would have been like with his scene partner, Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems, Punch Drunk Love) in the role.

Jay Kelly the man is a Cary Grant-esque movie star whose personal life starts to fall apart when his daughter leaves for Europe to find herself. At the same time, one old friend leaves Kelly’s life forever, and another returns to it. Desperate to reclaim a shaken sense of identity, Kelly turns to his adoring public. He tasks his manager, played by Sandler, to arrange a tribute award at a European film festival. As he heads across the ocean, Kelly drags his entourage, his family, and the public into his identity crisis.

There are moments here that I will return to often, such as the hilarious train car sequence or his memories of his big break. But there is not the fountain of emotion the film is obviously trying to reach when quoting Babylon (2023) at you. Directed by Noah Bombauch (Marriage Story, White Noise), it is impeccably shot and frequently funny. Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Marriage Story) and Sandler support the film as the only friends and employees who have stood by Kelly. It touches the same emotional 3rd rails that Sentimental Value (2025) and Close Your Eyes (2024) do, films that have burrowed into my soul. But Jay Kelly hasn’t. Why? I’m an easy target for this kind of melancholic wrestling match. Unfortunately, like Clooney himself, the film needs to shut up and embrace the fact that he did good work as Batman.

Batman Forever (1995) was an earnest try at something unpopular but essential to the cultural idea of Batman, his silliness. The dissonance between the Bat-Credit Card and The Joker asking “Why so serious” is what makes Batman a mythical movie figure. The sliding door of culture accepting Clooney as Batman, and his angry rejection of it, is essential to his star persona. Our understanding of Kelly’s career is one without such a sliding door. He’s asking himself what was worth more, his great career or his relationships with those he cares about. That there are paycheck gigs he cared little for is clear, but never does he seem to wrestle with a disaster that took him away from his family. “All this for what?” is played in a minor, not major key. The absence of an analog in Jay Kelly’s career removes a few feet of track from the audience’s path to the ending, and so we arrive at it as unprepared as Kelly, moved, but without the toolkit to wrestle with why. In great films, ambiguity is the point. In Jay Kelly, it is the mumbling end to an involving conversation, with one party asking the other to speak a little louder, to no avail.

Final Score: 3.5/5