Hollywood & Europe

 Two films, which curiously and probably unintentionally repeat one another, have landed.  Compare Netflix' Jay Kelly and the Norwegian Sentimental Value, and you find yourself starting off from the same point. We see a successful on-screen filmmaker, approaching the end of his career, trying to repair the damage prioritising his work has done to his relationship with his two daughters. However the difference between the films proves more revealing than their similarities.

Jay Kelley represents a new level of ambition for writer-director Noah Baumbach, after a body of work including his Marriage Story and Frances Ha. The opening shows George Clooney collapsed in a noirish urban gutter, with a Pepsi Neon in the background and a dog sniffing him. Turns out Clooney’s movie star Jay Kelly is asking for another take with the camera still running.

Jay Kelly at work

 The piece rapidly works up traction with a flashback to the familiar story of the actor who went to an audition with a friend and was given the part instead of him.  Today’s Kelly watches the incident with  Charlie Rowe as his younger self, veteran director Jim Broadbent and friend  Billy Crudup. The bitterness is an early surprise.

We find Kelly-Clooney’s teenage daughter Grace Edwards is going off with her friends on her gap year trip, when Clooney expected her to spend the time with him. He tracks the daughter through her girlfriend’s mother’s credit card. (the girl tells her mum she’s worse than Hitler) This works out as twenty five year manager Adam Sandler abruptly having to revive the Italian tribute presentation that he had cancelled and scenes of the Kelly motorcade rolling through Paris with his entourage reduced to seats in a second-class rail carriage. While Sandler fears the worst, Clooney turns this into a personal appearance, winning applause from the cut-price passengers with his polished Jay Kelly movie star charm. Watching, the daughter is less impressed than her star-struck videographer boyfriend. 

As the trip continues to his Italian honours, which Clooney now has to share with younger star Patrick Wilson, the extraordinary support cast come into their own. It’s still easy to see who are the movie stars and who are the extras. Lenny Henry registers in his brief acting school teacher part and Greta Gerwig makes her isn’t-that-Greta-Gerwig character radiate female sympathy.  The ever extraordinary Alba Rowacher stands out in a nothing part, not inhibited by the fact that she shares most of her scenes as driver for the still imposing Stacy Keach as Kelly's dad.  Laura Dern doing makeup lady asserts, being the first person to desert the Jay Kelly bandwagon. One of the best details is Sandler touching up the white hairs in Clooney’s eye brows with a Sharpy in her place.  Only Isla Fischer is lost in the shuffle.

Giovanni Esposito, Rowacher, Keach & Clooney with cheesecake.

 A bag-snatcher episode generates a familiar plot twist, the star living out his screen action hero fantasies. This seems to particularly appeal to movie cowboys. Think Jack Carson in The Groom Wore Spurs or my old favorites Richard Dix in It Happened in Hollywood & Buck Jones in Thrill Hunter. It’s more comfortable than the scenario we get here again about fans as menacing and comic grotesques. Include Woody Allen and Stardust Memories, Kad Merad in Mes Stars & Moi, The King of Comedy or The Fan (adulation seems to be particularly troubling to Robert de Niro).

However, there is a surprise new emphasis. In the wake of Diego Calva in Babylon, we get Sandler as another enabler central character. These also are not new to movies. Think the disenchanted Lionel Stander or Jack Carson (again) in the first two Star Is Born movies and, later, Jason Robards in George Axelrod's now forgotten 1968 Secret Life of An American Wife.  However it's hard to tell whether it's Sandler's performance or the writing that places his perfect foil agent/manager character  (“Our love is unconditional. It’s like parents or imaginary friends”) at the heart of the film as Sandler becomes as imposing as the top-billed star. 

 

Possibly the most resonant thing, about what is a substantial film, is the way that Sandler's victim/minder- is also manipulating Clooney/Kelly (“Friends don’t take sixteen percent”) maneouvering him into the new production that he doesn’t want to do, with the dialogue in the Italian town square, where people are dancing under the wall size awning of a  handsome, younger George, asserting that what they are celebrating is also Sandler’s life’s work, with him also missing family events and making sacrifices.  “I’m Jay Kelly too.” Adam Sandler has pulled off the feat that defeated  Jerry Lewis, Red Skelton, Bob Hope or Fernandel. He has made the transition from career star comic to remarkable serious actor.  

Coming after a couple of hours of best A feature globe trotting, with all the great celebrity bit parts, Jay Kelly disappoints by failing to deliver the final revelation they try to generate. The piece gives the impression of an undisciplined edit. Touches are too calculated - the motif cheese cake or “I’m always alone” as the flunky brings Clooney tea (anticipating Sandler telling him to get his own bottled water on the train). The fusion of Clooney and Kelly in the tribute reel of the star’s own old movies, which the character dismisses, worries me too.

 Then there's Affeksjonsverdi/Sentimen-tal Value, offering its story of the celebrity European filmmaker, who has similarly neglected his child’s upbringing, which provides a revealing contrast between European and US production.

Norwegian director (how many of those can you name) Joachim Trier had a breakout success in his Verdens verste menneske/ The Worst Person in the World with star Renata Reinsve, which found a public by putting on the screen performers who registered more like people than scripted characters, so here they are back again, doubling down with a more ambitious production and adding a name star in Stellan Skarsgård. The first time we see him, he's the lead actor we recognise from his earlier films - turns out that's a distant view with his hair dyed, seen through distorting window glass, as he abandoned the family home. There's a surprise when we find him older and gentler.

A work of European High Seriousness, Sentimental Value references, Ibsen, Chekov - and Lasse Hallstrom. That means it faces a challenge as coming off as poor man’s Ingmar Bergman - particularly when it centers on a film director self portrait. It has textual complexity with theatre and film, parental responsibility, the grandmother’s suicide and the idea of the scarlet trimmed timber house, where three generations have lived, become a character.

Sentimental Values -Reinsve & Lilleaas

In the present, Reinsve is fronting a prestige stage production of “The Doll’s House”. She’s so rattled that she has her co-star married lover slap her to psych her up before going on. Further stress is generated by dad Skarsgård’s re-appearance in the home, which he technically still owns - an irregularity in the mother’s will.

Skarsgård re-enters his daughters' lives because he wants  Reinsve to star in his comeback production. She is less tolerant of celebrity deadbeat dad Stelan, who abandoned them, than her sister Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, the one who reads his script and urges Reinsve to participate in a work of such high seriousness. We get a glimpse of Lilleaas' character, as a child appearing in one of Stelan's earlier films.

Jay Kelly - Clooney & Riley  Keough

Curiously similar, Jay Kelly also attempts to shoehorn in the second daughter with a scene of Clooney talking to Riley Keough on his i'Phone as he moves through the forest, which changes on an edit to her imagined presence walking beside him. Both sister characters have become substitute mother to the sibling on whom our attention is focused. Digression comes in Skaarsgård having a boozy Venice Film Festival nighttime on the beach with Elle Fanning, doing a thinly disguised self-portrait as a Hollywood star who is drawn in by the prospect of working with a luminary of the foreign art cinema and who he steadily but unsuccessfully attempts to make-over in Reinsve’s image for his film. This could be more interesting than what they deliver.

 The big ask is validating Skaarsgård’s project, from which we've heard only the lines “Prayer is not talking to God. It is a cry of desperation” early on. How Ingmar Bergman can you get? The later extended reading does plausibly come close to endorsing Lilleaas’s belief that it has the artistic importance to override objections, as it has done with the character letting her own pre-schooler appear.

Von Trier with Skaarsgård

Points for complexity and craft skills but this one wavers when it approaches achieving substance. What are they trying to tell us and is it worth the effort? It's not the one, of these two movies, I'd willingly sit through again. However, I find it intriguing that the American film, as with other Hollywood productions -  add Dean Martin in Joseph Anthony's 1959 Career, Walter Matthau in Secret Life of an American Wife and particularly Woody Allen's Stardust Memories - all propose Hollywood success as tawdry. Films that provide a sunnier assessment, like The Bad & the Beautiful, James L. Brooks L'll Do Anything all the way back to Maurice Tourneur's 1917 A Girl's Folly are way less determined. The overall picture is of an industry uneasy about itself, one that presents The Big Knife's bitterness with more confidence than Sullivan's Travels' cheery affirmation.

The repeating pattern is striking. Even people who are involved  in productions accept the notion of European High Art outclassing New World commercial product. 

It's not just film critics who can be sucked in.

Jay Kelly - Clooney's eyebrows

Barrie Pattison 2026.