There are filmmakers whose work you admire, and then there are filmmakers whose work recognises you. Noah Baumbach belongs firmly in the latter category. Across two decades, his cinema has quietly but relentlessly built an interior landscape. One that charts the fault lines between love and ego, presence and absence, intimacy and self-absorption. Jay Kelly doesn’t arrive as a departure from this body of work; it arrives as its most distilled expression.
The Squid and the Whale was built around the shock of recognition from the child’s point of view. It observed adults behaving badly, not as villains, but as wounded, contradictory human beings. What made the film so devastating was its refusal to tidy up emotional messiness. The parents were brilliant and selfish, loving and cruel – sometimes in the same sentence. That film wasn’t about divorce as an event; it was about divorce as atmosphere, as something children breathe without understanding its chemical composition.
By the time Baumbach made Marriage Story, the gaze had shifted. We were no longer watching adults through children’s eyes; we were watching adults watch themselves fall apart. That film was about articulation. About people finally finding the words to express years of suppressed resentment, love, disappointment and regret. It was louder, more confrontational, even theatrical at times. The emotions were no longer internalised; they were spilling out, uncontrollable, embarrassing and devastating.
Jay Kelly feels like the third act of this emotional journey. If The Squid and the Whale was about becoming aware and Marriage Story was about reckoning, Jay Kelly is about after. After the fights. After the separations. After success. After applause. When the question is no longer who was right? but what did it all amount to?
Played with characteristic charm and disarming restraint by George Clooney, Jay Kelly is a man who has survived his own life. He is globally famous, professionally validated, financially insulated and emotionally incomplete. What Baumbach does with Jay is crucial: he does not punish him, nor does he redeem him. He simply lets him be.
Jay is not haunted by scandal or failure. He is haunted by absence – by moments he missed, conversations he postponed, versions of himself he abandoned in order to keep moving. This is a profound shift from Baumbach’s earlier protagonists who were often still in the heat of conflict.
The film’s structure mirrors this internal state. Time is porous. Memory seeps into the present without warning. Flashbacks do not announce themselves as exposition; they arrive the way real memories do – triggered by a look, a silence, a mundane action. The past is not resolved; it coexists.
Baumbach has always been fascinated by relationships as systems of emotional accounting. Who gave more, who took less, who remembers differently. In Jay Kelly these ledgers are subtle but devastating.
Jay’s relationship with his daughter Daisy is not defined by grand failures, but by a thousand small absences. His attempt to accompany her on a trip before she leaves home is not framed as heroism; it’s framed as desperation disguised as spontaneity. The film understands something deeply uncomfortable: that love does not erase timing – and intention does not undo neglect.
Take Ron, Jay’s manager, played with extraordinary humanity by Adam Sandler. Ron may be one of Baumbach’s most compassionate creations. He is loyal, competent, emotionally available and largely unseen. Sandler plays him without irony, without the safety net of humour. Ron is the friend who stayed, who absorbed Jay’s turbulence without demanding reciprocity. That dynamic between the brilliant, consuming personality and the quiet enabler is one Baumbach understands intimately, and here he renders it with painful honesty.
Jay’s professional and personal histories with his publicist Liz, with old collaborators, with former friends are not dramatized as betrayals, but as drifts. Relationships don’t explode; they erode. And that erosion is far more unsettling.
What makes Jay Kelly especially resonant is that it is a film about cinema that never feels self-congratulatory. Jay’s career as a movie star is not used to glamorise the industry, but to interrogate it. Jay is always in some way, performing – even in private. The question the film keeps circling is brutal in its simplicity: when the performance ends, who is left watching?
Baumbach resists the temptation to turn this into a satire or a moral critique. Instead he frames cinema as memory-making. Films, like lives, are constructed from fragments. What we leave behind is not truth, but a version of ourselves others assemble.
In this film, you feel like Baumbach has grown gentler without becoming softer. Jay Kelly does not excuse its protagonist, but it does allow him dignity. There is no final absolution, no dramatic transformation. There is only recognition – of self, of loss, of love that arrived late but still mattered.
I’ve always said that we don’t make movies – we make memories. Baumbach’s film echoes this instinctively. Jay Kelly feels like a memory you didn’t know you shared with someone else until you saw it projected back at you.
If The Squid and the Whale was about childhood understanding and Marriage Story about adult confrontation, Jay Kelly is about living with what remains. And sometimes, that is the hardest story of all.
Hansal mehta 