Poor Clooney, stumbled into a B-grade tragicomedy

"Can we do it again?" obsessively asks Jey Kelly (George Clooney) on set, despite the fact that he is a consummate professional and highly successful actor. But it is not Clooney, whose acting - along with that of Laura Dern and Adam Sandler - is the only really solid thing about the film named after its protagonist, Jay Kelly, who has to redo the job. Rather, it should be director Noah Baumbach, who put forward a film that would have been good out of competition to bring some stardust, from Clooney to Dern to Sandler, to the red carpet.

The film follows the trail of Jay Kelly and his devoted manager Ron (Sandler), always at a crossroads between his profession and his private life. The latter definitely takes a back seat in the star's life, until Kelly decides to make a change. He decides, in fact, to chase his youngest daughter on an on-the-road trip through Europe and ends up on a train in a second-class carriage between Paris and Tuscany, where the presence of travellers triggers a reflection on his loving and paternal, as well as professional, past.

What part do we play in our lives? the film seems to ask. "Each of us changes in relation to our work," Baumbach explained at the press conference, Clooney absent due to a sinus infection. Baumbach has accustomed us to family crises and tragic rivulets, to loneliness, for example, with the begmannish History of a Marriage with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson and The Meyerowitz Stories, in which Sandler also starred. He accustomed us to comedy, especially with the wonderful levity of his partner Greta Gerwig, whom he met on the set of The Extravagant World of Greenberg and whom he had directed in Frances Ha. Around that kind of naive and irresistible woman, in Jay Kelly the love scene with stink seems to be built.

The difficulty for family members to relate to a busy star is a theme dear to Baumbach, son of writer and film critic Jonathan Baumbach and critic Georgia Brown. The same Laura Dern, who thanks to Baumabch in Story of a Marriage (2019) won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Dern is, in fact, the daughter of two actors, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd.

But here Baumbach arrives at self-parody in a film that is indecisive between the tragic loneliness of success, a rehashed theme, light comedy, or rather very light comedy, and the B-movie with lots of chatty, naive Italians, the only people who have retained humanity. If he had chosen not Tuscany but Campania, you can bet he would have also put in pizza and mandolin.