Co-written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, Jay Kelly follows countless other US films and television series, many of them influenced by HBO hit The White Lotus, which drool over the lifestyles of the rich and famous. At the moment, there are far too many of these glossy tributes to the one per cent on our screens, but most of them include a murder (The Perfect Couple) or some vicious conspiring (Succession), so we can tell ourselves that we’re not merely envy-watching a selection of vast kitchens with ocean views. There is no such intrigue in Jay Kelly. His mid-life crisis is so mild that “crisis” isn’t really the appropriate word – and yet this is a comedy that takes its central character deeply seriously. Viewers may struggle to do the same.
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The film opens with a Sylvia Plath quote, not that Jay’s angst has anything to do with Plath’s, and goes on to revere him as a troubled demigod: there are fond flashbacks to his younger days, there are speeches in praise of his filmography, there is maudlin piano music tinkling on the soundtrack. There are also a few pithy one-liners about his failure to appreciate his own wildly fortunate position, but for most of the running time, the viewer is encouraged to admire a well-meaning, magically talented guy who has enriched the world with decades of great performances, and has done so without acquiring any drug problems, sex scandals or other skeletons in his closet. The woolly sentimentality of this indulgent romantic fantasy gets hard to stomach. When you watch Seth Rogen’s terrific Apple TV+ series about Hollywood executives and stars, The Studio, you are expected to laugh with as well as laugh at the characters, but you aren’t expected to venerate them.
The same used to be true of Baumbach’s characters. In the past, his piquant comedies were populated almost exclusively with people who were foolish, frustrated and sometimes just plain horrible – so it’s disappointing that he, like so many current film-makers, is so soft on the world’s most privileged people. Are they really inherently fascinating and impressive, just because have more money in the bank than the average country?
Still, maybe such people don’t seem so privileged to Baumbach any more. One of the most enjoyable aspects of his films is how obviously linked they are to his own life and concerns. The Squid and the Whale was about growing up in Brooklyn as the son of an aspiring novelist, as Baumbach did; While We’re Young (2014) was about a New York-based film-maker facing middle age; Marriage Story was about a New York-based director getting divorced. Having co-written the blockbusting Barbie with his wife Greta Gerwig (who also directed the film), it’s understandable that Hollywood’s glamorous upper echelons should be the current topic on his mind. But couldn’t he have brought some of his old lacerating wit to it? Throughout Jay Kelly, Jay is fawned over by the public, and mollycoddled by his handlers. Baumbach does too much fawning and mollycoddling of his own.
Jay Kelly will be in US and UK cinemas from November 14 and on Netflix internationally from December 15.
