Noah Baumbach’s 'Jay Kelly' Is a Cautionary Tale

Noah Baumbach first made a name for himself 30 years ago, writing and directing intelligent dark comedies about sad boys and angry men staring down the barrel of adulthood and all the difficulties that come with it: failure, resentment, isolation, remorse, aging, irrelevance, and death. In this respect, his latest film, Jay Kelly, presents more of the same, as Hollywood icon George Clooney hams it up in a thinly veiled performance of himself, glancing back at his own life beneath Sharpie-dark eyebrows. In the light of a Tuscan summer, he looks like Marcello Mastroianni if Federico Fellini had shot 8½ in color. From the portraits of Mastroianni and his frequent co-star Sophia Loren, pinned up around Jay’s green room in the film’s penultimate scene, it’s easy to conclude that the homage is self-conscious.