Jay Kelly (2025)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Famous movie actor Jay Kelly embarks on a journey of self-discovery, confronting both his past and present, accompanied by his devoted manager, Ron.
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In the light of a Tuscan summer, he looks like Marcello Mastroianni if Federico Fellini had shot 8½ in color.
The shadow of “8½” looms large over Noah Baumbach’s tale of an actor looking back at his life and regretting choices he’s made, but “Jay Kelly” has little of the resonance and imagination of Fellini’s masterpiece.
In a way, this is Clooney’s 8½.
The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½.
…here one of Tinseltown’s golden boys gets his own 8½ moment, with Baumbach joining the league of filmmakers enamoured enough with the magic of movie making to get all metatextual about it.
After the lacklustre response to 2022’s White Noise, Baumbach returns to familiar territory here, crafting a coming-of-middle-age comic drama influenced by Fellini’s 8½.
What these films, and other noteworthy examples like Stardust Memories and Pain and Glory, have in common is the sincerity and honesty that lies beneath the fiction, taken from real emotions and experiences.
…it comes across as even less insightful a tribute to Fellini than Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.”
Baumbach has wandered into the territory of 8½ and Stardust Memories and he gets a bit lost in the woods…
There are echoes, too, of some of Woody Allen’s more reflective comedies, for instance, 1980’s Stardust Memories, which has similar scenes of celebrities swarmed by adoring fans.
So Baumbach’s film pirouettes into territory already trodden by Fellini’s 81/2 and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories…
If this is in fact Baumbach’s Stardust Memories (and it is, complete with its own reference to Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2) then, when it’s all said and done, it needed a little more stardust to standout.
…but don’t expect “Sunset Boulevard,” “Tropic Thunder” or “Network.”
They can be comedic (Singin’ in the Rain, Day for Night), personal (The Fabelmans, 8/12), reflective (Sullivan’s Travels, Stardust Memories), acerbic (The Player, Sunset Boulevard)…
De ‘El crepúsculo de los dioses’ a la serie ‘The Studio’…
In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, we witness the tragic fate of silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), whose career has faded due to the introduction of sound into motion pictures. She tries to exploit a young writer for a role that can revive her career–have the opportunity to shine in the medium’s evolution–but the Hollywood ruthless machine, obsessed with young faces, which serves as commodities until they are worthless, drives her to self-destruction and severe obsession.
…the aging actor trope played out in films like my personal favs – A Star is Born and Sunset Boulevard…
…it’s the comedic male equivalent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)…
It's a thing we've seen in, like, Fellini or Wild Strawberries.
Thematically, Jay Kelly seems to be trying to maneuver between two great classics – Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.
Yes, it’s mildly evocative of the Ingmar Bergman classic Wild Strawberries, from 1957, but it’s strikingly similar to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, released in the U.S. just a month ago.
These bits exploring the porousness between memory and reality recall Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, though their poignancy doesn’t make up for their clunky deployment.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly doesn’t have strawberries like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But it does have an aging man reflecting on his life as he travels to collect a lifetime achievement award.
At times, Jay seems like a Hollywood version of the egotistical professor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.
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…as it made me think at times of Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Preston Sturges’ sublime Sullivan’s Travels.
Con un poco del Fellini de 8 y medio, otro poco del Preston Sturgues de Los viajes de Sullivan y hasta dos gotas del Hitchcock de cualquiera de sus películas con un hombre que huye, el director compone la quintaesencia de las películas agradables, simpáticas, disfrutables y bastante bobas, todo sea dicho.
En esos momentos en que la película pretende ser Los viajes de Sullivan (ya quisiera el director de Historia de matrimonio tener el toque de Preston Sturges), el andamio se tambalea.
La huella de Sullivan’s Travels sobrevuela el film, pero solo como eco temático. En vez de un viaje físico y emocional que confronte al artista con su propia ignorancia, Baumbach parece replicar el gesto sin la convicción necesaria.
Jay Kelly’s attempt to reconnect with the people who watch his movies is akin to Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels…
Baumbach, a skilled neo-screwball farceur, pays extended homage to “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), Preston Sturges’s comedy about a commercial Hollywood filmmaker who, in a fit of high-mindedness, seeks to rub elbows with the common man.
It is no mistake that the opening, The Player-esque oner on a movie set, which culminates in a demonstration of Kelly’s talents, is really a show-off move by the director.
…a dramedy that mixes the satirical industry insider aspects of The Player (1992)…
Its Robert Altman-esque opening is reminiscent of The Player, with its overlapping dialogue…
…pasando por títulos como ‘Cantando bajo la lluvia’ (Jay Kelly remite a Gene Kelly) o ‘The Player (El juego de Hollywood)’…
…a final day captured by Sandgren in a virtuoso single take that opens the movie — perhaps an homage to Robert Altman’s epic oner at the start of The Player…
…it’s a riff on the kind of oner that opens films like “The Player”…
Another example is All That Jazz, the semi-autobiographical musical by Bob Fosse, which utilizes the director’s own experiences to tell a story about the addictive nature of show business, mortality, and the struggle to cling to what’s slipping away – love, family, health, fame, and career.
The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½.
With a nod to such movies as 8½ and All That Jazz, a feeble script by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer touches on interesting conceits…
No hay realmente mucho espacio para lo metacinematográfico que sí podían exhibir referentes claros como ‘Fellini, ocho y medio’ o ‘All That Jazz (Empieza el espectáculo)’.
…and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other…
Bob Fosse may have made a thinly disguised biography of his own life in 1979 with ALL THAT JAZZ, but at least he cast a different actor (Roy Scheider) to play him onscreen.
The closest comparison to Jay Kelly I could think of is the more anarchic films of Federico Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, where the Italian director started to wrestle with his own success.
Never does the material reach the heights of truly great films about this kind of world and its crossroads, such as “The Great Beauty” or “La Dolce Vita.”
(Allen’s films are inspired by Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, from 1963, which shares a lot with the master Italian director’s La Dolce Vita, from three years earlier, which, in turn, informed Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, from 2013, though the latter two movies concern journalists, not performers.)
The story also lifts parts of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, about a tabloid journalist confronting the emptiness of his celebrity-centric life, and the same director’s 8½, about the midlife crisis of a self-indulgent filmmaker.
I couldn’t help but picture Marcello Mastroianni, taking stock of his life in Fellini’s 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita.
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Films such as Cinema Paradiso and The Long Day Closes highlight the magic of filmmaking through the eyes of consumers seeking escapism.
Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other.
The soaring heights of Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Babylon (2022) fill the spectator’s mind as Jay realizes there are no re-does in life, unlike in the movies.
Its theme of ‘life reflected through cinema’ brings to mind Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, but not nearly as memorable.
…with the sincerity and heart of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)…
The reminiscing almost feels like It’s a Wonderful Life, except with the protagonist realizing he was actually kind of awful.
The film is a thinly veiled It’s a Wonderful Life.
Jay admits in one of several George Bailey–esque soliloquies…
Think It’s a Wonderful Life for the modern age, with poetic setups and payoffs that hit like a warm hug.