Metacritic-Rezensionen

As a filmmaker, Baumbach is sharp enough to call out the clichés of his trade, but also generous enough to put them to good use anyway.

It is Clooney, of course, that anchors and crowns this dramedy milimetrically envisioned to tug at the hearts of cinephiles (and, for the sake of addressing the elephant in the Netflix room, awards voters).

A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.

The movie has absorbed its actor’s vibe. It looks great, and it ambles along pleasantly, rarely veering too far into the dramatic or the emotional; moments of tension or insight are often defused with a laugh or some other odd narrative distraction. But by the end, it gets you anyway.

Although Jay Kelly explores familiar thematic terrain of an ageing man wrestling with regret, this tender film is mildly radical in its insistence that celebrities were once just everyday people — and might still be during unguarded moments.

Baumbach lacks Sofia Coppola’s singular ability to leverage a character’s wealth for the wanting it reveals of them, but he, Mortimer, and Clooney share a vivid understanding of the resentments that can form in the space between who we are and how we’re seen — and of how stardom can widen that space to the point that friendships and families are liable to fall into it unnoticed.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best.

Jay Kelly is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that’s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it’s the definition of a movie that goes down easy.

The film does indeed reflect how megastardom goes about its business. The script, by the director and Emily Mortimer, piles on the irony with admirable diligence. But this is about as cutting-edge as making fun of Donald Trump for being orange.

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.