"Noah Baumbach loves to find sympathy in unsympathetic subjects-the awkward title character of Greenberg, the caustic writer played by Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding, the bitter divorced couple of Marriage Story. But he's usually done it by mixing in plenty of bitter with just a touch of sweet. For his new movie, Jay Kelly, that formula is reversed in service of another character who might struggle to earn the viewer's pity: a bored, aging movie star worried that he's lived life the wrong way."
"Another director might have had a hard time getting audiences to care about the prosaic concerns of this beloved millionaire, but Baumbach, in casting Clooney, chose a star who himself has seemed a little lost at sea. After spending years mostly directing his own projects, usually to middling reviews, Clooney has recently turned in a couple of performances that felt like pale facsimiles of former glories, in the rom-com Ticket to Paradise and the action-thriller Wolfs."
A filmmaker finds empathy for an unsympathetic, bored, aging movie star whose doubts and regrets dominate the story. The film reverses a familiar bittersweet formula, emphasizing sweetness over bitterness to invite sympathy for a privileged but creatively dissatisfied protagonist. Casting a well-known actor with recent uneven performances amplifies the character's sense of being adrift. The project represents a widening scope from smaller indie dramedies toward more ambitious, mainstream releases through a streaming partnership with a brief theatrical window. The narrative centers on fame, creative regret, and personal disconnection.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]