Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly opens with a quote by Sylvia Plath, “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” This remains a mirror of the story that Jay Kelly roots from. The film takes you into the life of an extravagantly successful movie star—the world’s beloved, yet ironically not the ideal family man in his daughters’ eyes. The film features George Clooney, as Baumbach has mentioned that he wrote Jay Kelly with George in mind. He said, “We all have a relationship with George Clooney as an actor and movie star from over the years.”
As you watch the film, it doesn’t go for an intense, flashy showcase of glamorous moments a successful movie star encounters—it aims at the humane layers of a movie star that remain unseen and hidden from the public eye. And oftentimes, one’s towering success and the amount of love that he gets from the country people, does not equal what the star gets to taste in his personal life. Something you see Jay Kelly facing in his life: unaware that one of his daughters is seeing therapy, while his younger daughter, Daisy, is very unbothered by Jay Kelly’s success and eventually refuses to spend time with him, goes frantic that her father has been stalking her.
In mid of all this, we have Jay Kelly in a dilemma, at one end, the hero that he is, and the people love him for that, and we have his devoted manager, Ron, played by Adam Sandler, who is high on emotional quotient, and deeply cares about Jay Kelly. The cinematic performances leave you flabbergasted, indeed.
But you learn more about life as you watch it—that is the price you pay to be yourself—it becomes a responsible performance eventually, and at a certain point, you just become the identity you create for the world, nothing more or nothing less. There lies the trick, to be able to hold what you built, the legacy that you create—when your stardom becomes you, other than that, who you are—the world doesn’t bother, and sometimes not even your family.
