George Clooney basically plays himself in Jay Kelly

Xan Brooks, The Independent

In the summer of 2024, in the interests of research, Kevin Bacon took on his most demanding and dangerous role to date. He put on a fake nose, inserted a set of false teeth and play-acted the part of an ordinary man. For a few terrifying hours at a Los Angeles shopping mall, the Mystic River star went completely Method, mixing with the shoppers outside Foot Locker and experiencing the full feral horror of everyday life. "People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice," he would later tell a reporter. "I had to wait in line to, I don't know, buy a coffee or whatever." The role understandably took an immediate toll on his system. "I was like, this sucks," he recalled thinking. "I want to go back to being famous."

I was reminded of Bacon's gruelling social experiment while watching the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an A-list Hollywood actor on his way to collect a lifetime achievement in Tuscany. Naturally, Jay Kelly never has to wait in line for coffee. At one stage he even gets one he hasn't asked for slid into his hand by a passing poolside butler. He is wealthy and handsome and pampered and indulged. Which is to say that he's basically George Clooney and that the Oscar-winning actor is essentially playing himself. This means no fake nose or false teeth to deploy as a disguise. It means no place to run and nowhere to hide. "Have you ever tried playing yourself?" Clooney — perhaps rhetorically — asked a Vanity Fair journalist last month. "It's hard to do."

If there is a message to draw from these two tales of actorly angst, it's that fame is a bubble and that celebrities bear no more than a passing resemblance to real people. And although Clooney and Bacon are both smart men and fine actors, their gallant efforts to connect with the normies — either by coyly inviting us into their world or attempting to travel incognito through ours — were always destined to run aground. Or to put it another way, I'm not sure there's anything more guaranteed to highlight the gulf between them and us than the sight of a tanned George Clooney looking sad beside his swimming pool, unless it's the dawning realisation that the next man in line is that bloke out of Footloose wearing a set of outsized Ken Dodd teeth.

A few years ago Tom Hanks wrote a novel called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture. This purported to lift the lid on the nuts and bolts of film production, to usher the reader behind the velvet rope and reveal how Hollywood artists really live and work. To demonstrate this, the story featured a brilliant, godlike director who commands a crack team of hard-working, sometimes troubled but super-talented actors. The only baddies I recall were the upstarts and losers. The cast and crew-members who don't quite know their place. The sad-sack creepy fans who want to sneak onto the set. It was in short (very short: Hanks's tale actually lasts 450 pages) a preening, elitist self-own of a book. It turned out to be one-part Forrest Gump and two-parts Ayn Rand.

Jay Kelly is nothing like as bad as The Making of Another Major Motion Picture. It is, though, prone to the same soft-headed complacency and the same misjudged levels of sympathy for the plight of the super-rich. Its hero (or is it Clooney?) comes across as a tragicomic Peter Pan and is treated with a kind of fond exasperation by his doting handlers. He ambles about in honeyed light, flashing his mournful movie star smile and saying things like "I think I'm always alone" and "my life doesn't feel real" and "this feels like a movie where I'm playing myself", which of course it is. But on the evidence of Jay Kelly, I prefer Clooney when he's playing other people. Playing himself, supposedly the toughest challenge of them all, is not the ideal look for him. Bizarrely, it leaves this serenely confident performer looking suddenly unconvincing and unrelatable.