In the summer of 2024, in the interests of research, Kevin Bacon took on his most demanding and dangerous role to date. He put on a fake nose, inserted a set of false teeth and play-acted the part of an ordinary man. For a few terrifying hours at a Los Angeles shopping mall, the Mystic River star went completely Method, mixing with the shoppers outside Foot Locker and experiencing the full feral horror of everyday life. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” he would later tell a reporter. “I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f***ing coffee or whatever.” The role understandably took an immediate toll on his system. “I was like, this sucks,” he recalled thinking. “I want to go back to being famous.”
I was reminded of Bacon’s gruelling social experiment while watching the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an A-list Hollywood actor on his way to collect a lifetime achievement in Tuscany. Naturally, Jay Kelly never has to wait in line for coffee. At one stage he even gets one he hasn’t asked for slid into his hand by a passing poolside butler. He is wealthy and handsome and pampered and indulged. Which is to say that he’s basically George Clooney and that the Oscar-winning actor is essentially playing himself. This means no fake nose or false teeth to deploy as a disguise. It means no place to run and nowhere to hide. “Have you ever tried playing yourself?” Clooney – perhaps rhetorically – asked a Vanity Fair journalist last month. “It’s hard to do.”
If there is a message to draw from these two tales of actorly angst, it’s that fame is a bubble and that celebrities bear no more than a passing resemblance to real people. And although Clooney and Bacon are both smart men and fine actors, their gallant efforts to connect with the normies – either by coyly inviting us into their world or attempting to travel incognito through ours – were always destined to run aground. Or to put it another way, I’m not sure there’s anything more guaranteed to highlight the gulf between them and us than the sight of a tanned George Clooney looking sad beside his swimming pool, unless it’s the dawning realisation that the next man in line is that bloke out of Footloose wearing a set of outsized Ken Dodd teeth.
A few years ago Tom Hanks wrote a novel called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture. This purported to lift the lid on the nuts and bolts of film production, to usher the reader behind the velvet rope and reveal how Hollywood artists really live and work. To demonstrate this, the story featured a brilliant, godlike director who commands a crack team of hard-working, sometimes troubled but super-talented actors. The only baddies I recall were the upstarts and losers. The cast and crew-members who don’t quite know their place. The sad-sack creepy fans who want to sneak onto the set. It was in short (very short: Hanks’s tale actually lasts 450 pages) a preening, elitist self-own of a book. It turned out to be one-part Forrest Gump and two-parts Ayn Rand.
Jay Kelly is nothing like as bad as The Making of Another Major Motion Picture. It is, though, prone to the same soft-headed complacency and the same misjudged levels of sympathy for the plight of the super-rich. Its hero (or is it Clooney?) comes across as a tragicomic Peter Pan and is treated with a kind of fond exasperation by his doting handlers. He ambles about in honeyed light, flashing his mournful movie star smile and saying things like “I think I’m always alone” and “my life doesn’t feel real” and “this feels like a movie where I’m playing myself”, which of course it is. But on the evidence of Jay Kelly, I prefer Clooney when he’s playing other people. Playing himself, supposedly the toughest challenge of them all, is not the ideal look for him. Bizarrely, it leaves this serenely confident performer looking suddenly unconvincing and unrelatable.
It’s a neat piece of brand management, impersonating yourself on the screen, although it tends to work best when it’s played more for jokes than for pathos. Knowing self-satire is what drove the likes of TV’s Extras, The Larry Sanders Show and The Trip. It’s what links Bill Murray’s rueful cameo in Zombieland (2009) with Keanu Reeves’s vainglorious posing in Always Be My Maybe (2019) and Nicolas Cage’s turn as a demented cash-strapped actor in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022). Arguably the smart actors are the ones who best play to our prejudice. They know the general public, by and large, regard celebrities as a band of grotesque and comical monsters. We’re happy to ogle their infinity pools and observe their first-world problems. But we’d much rather sit back and laugh at their appallingly brattish behaviour.
Baumbach’s film deserves some credit for taking the more nuanced and challenging route, one that reaches for Fellini levels of playful self-scrutiny as it parks a misty-eyed Clooney in front of his own tribute showreel and reminds us that it’s lonely at the top and that money can’t buy happiness. Both of which may well be true. It’s just a shame that the comedy feels so cosy and condescending, so fatally excluding of its audience.
“With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” says Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940). That counts as good, sound advice, except that patience has its limits. Midway through Clooney’s rueful, reflective voyage around himself, Jay Kelly has comprehensively and flagrantly worn out its welcome. The tale stirs the blood just as effectively as The Battle of Algiers (1966), to the point where a full-blown revolution feels like the only sensible course of action. Break the gilded cage and flip the pyramid on its head. Have the A-listers line up outside Starbucks forever, and let the normies go free and make the movies instead.
‘Jay Kelly’ is in selected cinemas from 14 November, and streams on Netflix from 5 December
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