Jay Kelly 

Rating:

The most glamorous red-carpet scenes of this year’s Venice Film Festival – at last night’s world premiere of Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney as a world-famous movie star – preceded what is thus far the event’s most disappointing picture.

Expectations of this Netflix comedy, by writer-director Noah Baumbach, were sky-high.

After all, Baumbach’s credits include the awards-festooned Marriage Story (2019), while Jay Kelly’s glittering cast also features Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, the director’s real-life partner Greta Gerwig, and his co-writer Emily Mortimer.

But goodness, it’s a laboured affair, and the cute premise of a celebrated movie star playing a celebrated movie star feels steadily less amusing, never more than a quarter as funny as any episode of the TV show Extras. 

The actor Jay Kelly (note the syllabic similarity to George Clooney) is feted and flattered wherever he goes. His neurotic long-time manager (Sandler) adores him.

Yet Jay is growing ever more jaded, a feeling brought into sharp focus by a chance encounter with a resentful old drama-school friend played by Billy Crudup.

Jay’s fabulous career has cost him a healthy relationship with his two daughters so, to make up for lost time, he follows the younger of them to Europe, where she is on a backpacking holiday through France and Italy.

He therefore slums it on a train without any first-class compartments, losing members of his entourage as he goes. Baumbach strains to extract as much bittersweet comedy as he can from all this, while Clooney and Sandler give their utmost.

But a measure of the script’s mediocrity is that the better jokes (for instance, how can your manager also be your friend when he’s taking 15 per cent of your wages?) keep getting repeated.

At best, when the movie industry turns a mirror on itself, the results are joyous. Jay Kelly, by contrast, elicits only a few smiles and mostly boredom.

Jay Kelly streams on Netflix from December 5.