"As Sylvia Plath once wrote: "It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all." That quote serves as an almost oppressively fitting epigraph for the misty-eyed Netflix movie that Noah Baumbach has made about one of the last true Hollywood stars - or two of them, I should say, as Jay Kelly is so transparent a stand-in for the actor who plays him that he and George Clooney share the same body of work."
"Jay delivers it towards the start of the film, so soon after he's wrapped production on a new crime picture - "8 Men from Now," which ends with the actor dying for the umpteenth time - that he might as well still be reading from a script. There's an immediately perceptible twinge of regret in Clooney's voice, like the kind of shooting pain that can't mean anything serious so long as you choose to ignore it,"
Jay Kelly has subsumed himself into a classic screen persona—smirking, debonair, heroic—until he no longer seems to know who he is off set. The world-famous actor has come to prefer that lack of private identity. A resonant epigraph about the burden of being oneself frames the narrative of a dashing sexagenarian who is known by everyone and no one in equal measure. The screenplay adopts a slightly precious tone but still articulates the central dilemma. A line—"All my memories are movies"—signals the character's conflation of life and staged performance, with regret barely visible beneath practiced charm.
Read at IndieWire
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]