“Jay Kelly is the kind of film that would be used as a punchline in Baumbach’s earlier films.”

There was a time when Noah Baumbach had some edge to his work. His films were daring, subversive and played on familiar themes in ways that were always worth seeing, even if they could be quite sardonic and uncomfortable. Yet in recent years he has been fervently chasing a kind of artistic legitimacy that seems to be a poor fit for someone who, at a certain point in his career, seemed poised to be one of the cornerstones of an era of American independent filmmakers. Jay Kelly is his most recent offering, and if anyone was quietly hoping that he had turned a new corner when he mounted the flawed but inarguably ambitious adaptation of White Noise a few years back, they’re not likely to find it here. The film follows the titular character – a world-renowned film star – as he decides to go on a journey of self-discovery, accompanied by his entourage on a spontaneous trip across Europe, which will culminate in a tribute for him. What ensues is a series of reflections in which he confronts the past, being forced to reckon with the flaws that he has avoided addressing all his life. This is about as far as this film is willing to go before it gets quite repetitive, becoming one of the weaker offerings in Baumbach’s otherwise relatively solid career, and a film that frankly needed much more work to come across as anything other than decadent and self-congratulatory, which is ultimately all it amounts to by the end of two extremely long, exasperatingly insipid hours.

There are quite a few significant flaws scattered throughout Jay Kelly, but one of the most obvious is that Baumbach is someone who has a tendency to show his inspirations. This is not inherently worthy of criticism (as every filmmaker is influenced in some way or another by those who came before), but he seems unable to develop his own voice in his recent works, to the point where his motivations are too blatant to have any impact. Jay Kelly is what we imagine a mainstream version of Wild Strawberries would be – someone who is considered at the peak of their profession goes on a lengthy trip to receive an award, and along the way realises that they are a profoundly flawed individual, to the point where they begin to question the credibility of even accepting such praise. What begins as a relatively decent comedy about show business, and the efforts of a highly recognised public figure to return to a more normal way of life, eventually spirals into something far less endearing, particularly when it begins to move in circles, never really finding a discernible point to discuss or any real conflict, outside of stating the obvious: being famous is not always as enjoyable as it seems to be, and there are challenges that come with living your entire life in the public eye. Neither of these points needed to be repeated, especially when this film has very little else to say beyond the obvious.

It is only logical to expect a film about a world-renowned movie star to cast someone of the same calibre, assuming it was done in an elegant and subtle way. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here, with the decision to cast George Clooney feeling inspired at a glance, until we realise that this is simply an opportunity for someone who is the perfect embodiment of the fact that not all movie stars are actors (and vice versa) to play himself. He may be labelled with a different name, but this is so explicitly based on his life and career, it borders on frustratingly self-congratulatory and extremely dull. Clooney has shown skill when he is placed with a director who can harness his star quality and force him into doing something more interesting, but it’s clear that Baumbach was driven more by the desire to work with someone of his status than actually pushing him further. He’s not bad (as this film doesn’t give him any real conflict in which much acting could be done), but rather frankly dull and uninteresting, lacking the depth and nuance this role required. As we’d expect, the cast is populated by recognisable actors in roles that don’t demand too much from them – Adam Sandler is the closest the film has to a standout, mostly because he reins in his usual broad persona in exchange for something more subdued (a trait he’s inherited from his previous collaboration with the director), while everyone else is sadly wasted, having only a couple of scenes in which they attempt to leave an impression, but unfortunately fall victim to an already bloated film that simply does not know what to do with them all.

Jay Kelly is a film in which the execution is the primary source of the shortcomings, since there are far too many flaws for us to excuse it as simply a maximalist crowdpleaser. For someone who has been in the business for this long, it’s astonishing that Baumbach struggles to cobble together a film that actually has a clear thesis statement – he seems to want to make a treatise on fame and success, but without the nuance needed. It’s extremely clichéd, with countless lines of dialogue being plucked from the playbook of predictability, the filmmaking itself very flat and uninspired (how does one make a film primarily set in Tuscany look so bland and lifeless?), and the emotions heavy-handed and overly dense. There is a quality that we find in the director’s earliest works that feels entirely missing here, which is a sense of cynicism – Baumbach used to skirt around the edges of morality by introducing us to characters who were deeply flawed, but had interesting qualities, on which his stories could be intricately built. Jay Kelly is nothing more than a bundle of overly saccharine setpieces in which we are told how to feel, and where everything serves the underlying vanity of this project. It also lacks structure, a loosely assembled bundle of moments designed to highlight the journey of the protagonist, nothing but shallow, one-dimensional filmmaking that serves very little purpose other than to highlight the absurdity of fame.

Ultimately, Jay Kelly is the kind of film that would be used as a punchline in Baumbach’s earlier films – toothless, bland and indulgent to the point where it loses all sense of self-awareness and elegance. It lacks the bite that made his previous work so exciting, with the over-emphasis on sentimentality, and some very obvious narrative choices that clearly aim for the low-hanging fruit, preventing it from achieving anything close to greatness. There are a couple of moments where it feels like it is adding some layers (mostly in the third act), but just as quickly it loses all of its lustre, becoming nothing more than a painfully obvious attempt at satire that is neither interesting nor insightful, saying what we have all heard many times before, and not adding an ounce of nuance to a discussion that has been ongoing for decades. It’s not well-acted enough to be worth the time to see the cast (most of whom are wasted), the writing is very dull and the overall impression we have of the film is that it’s just an attempt to comment on something without ever making its position clear, choosing instead to be unintentionally hedonistic and self-glorifying, neither of which are earned in any conceivable way. Baumbach continues to devolve into someone who has lost his touch, and while it’s not a total misfire (with some redeemable moments, albeit few and far between), Jay Kelly does very little to inspire much confidence in this new iteration of his career.