Jay Kelly: A sublime character study

Jay Kelly (2025) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.14.25

The opening Sylvia Plath quote says it all:

 

“It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all.”

 

Flanked by publicist Liz (Laura Dern, center left) and best friend/handler Ron (Adam
Sandler, center right), Jay Kelly (George Clooney) cheerful interrupts his morning to
sign autographs for adoring fans.

Jay Kelly (George Clooney) has it all: a long and successful film career; a devoted entourage, including best friend and handler Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler); and the admiration and respect of fans, friends and professional colleagues.

 

He is one with Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and Robert De Niro: shapeshifters and chameleons of identity, with faces that represent something personal to millions.

 

But.

 

Jay’s nature, even when the cameras are off, remains a pose; he has no sense of self. His relationship with daughters Jessica (Riley Keough) and Daisy (Grace Edwards) is strained at best, estranged at worst. They’ve grown up seeing him repeatedly forsake them for the work: another movie, another months-long absence. Their mother and Jay’s other exes are distant memories.

 

He takes Ron for granted, failing to recognize the strain this keeps putting on his family.

 

Jay is selfish … and he’s so far gone, he’s incapable of recognizing this.

 

To be sure, he’s affable, suave and generous with the public; he’s also wheedling and persuasive, and knows how to get his way. After all, he has been doing it for decades. (This is George Clooney, after all; the man exudes charm and savoir faire the way the rest of us breathe.)

 

And yet …

 

Of late, Jay has begun to relive past choices: confronted by ghosts from his past, awakened to the shallowness of his present. And with this rising awareness comes a feeling he can’t quite identify:

 

Regret.

 

This plays out in director Noah Baumbach’s masterfully composed film, which enchants from its initial scene: cinematographer Linus Sandgren’s stunning, single-take tracking shot that follows the set-up and shooting of Jay’s final scene in his new movie, Eight Men from Now. Baumbach’s script, co-written with Emily Mortimer, is a masterful blend of drama, gentle humor, angst and character dynamics, brought to life by richly nuanced performances from Clooney and Sandler. Both are sure bets for Academy Award nominations.

 

(I understand the eyebrow lift. Adam Sandler, in a subtly shaded straight role? Hey, watch this film, then get back to me.)

Vengeance Most Fowl: It's a gnome run!

Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) • View trailer

4.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, and needlessly, for mild rude humor

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang 

Filmmaker Nick Park already had won two Oscars, the second for Wallace & Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers, when American viewers finally got to see that hilariously clever claymation short via a Wednesday evening PBS screening on March 20, 1995.

 

That’s how long it took to cross the pond. Unbelievable.

 

Wallace,left, thinks that his recently invented Norbot "helper gnome" will revolutionize
back-yard gardening ... but the more practical Gromit has his doubts.

We Yanks instantly recognized what our British cousins had known since Park burst onto the scene in 1989, with a pair of Oscar-nominated shorts: Creature Comforts took the award, besting A Grand Day Out, Wallace & Gromit’s debut adventure.

Park and his Aardman production team subsequently made the world a better place, in their own modest way: not merely by bringing renewed respect to the painstaking art of sculpted clay animation, but because they also carved a niche for adorable, family-friendly British whimsy.

 

Along the way, Park and his hilariously eccentric claymation duo collected two more Academy Awards, for 1996’s A Close Shave and 2006’s feature-length The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

 

They’re all laden with folksy, tea-and-cheese, veddy-British charm, laced with countless spot gags and a wacky, off-kilter sense of humor.

 

Along with plenty of eyeball-rolling puns. 

 

That’s also true of the many other delightful Aardman productions that kept us entertained along the way, among them Chicken Run, Arthur Christmas and Shaun the Sheep TV episodes and big-screen features.

 

All of which brings us to this new film: not merely the first Wallace & Gromit entry we’ve seen since 2010’s A Matter of Loaf and Death, but also an inspired sequel to The Wrong Trousers.

 

That earlier short’s villain — Feathers McGraw, the nefarious, inscrutable penguin who disguises himself as a chicken, with the help of a red rubber glove — is seeking payback. (Park and co-director Melin Crossingham must be the only people alive who could made a mute, animated penguin look sinister.)

 

A brief prologue recaps how the beloved duo captured Feathers, and turned him over to the constabulary; the penguin subsequently was sentenced to a “high-security institution” ... the local zoo.

 

The story proper kicks off on a typical day with the ceaselessly inventive Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead, sounding just like the late and very lamented Peter Sallis, who played this role for years).  Wallace never met a simple task that couldn’t be “improved” via some crazily complicated contraption.

 

By way of example, each morning begins when Gromit activates the “Get Up Deluxe,” which opens the curtains in Wallace’s bedroom, tilts his bed, and — with the push of a red “launch” button — sends him down a chute, removes his pajamas, dumps him into a bathtub — with pre-wash, soak, scrub and eco cycles — then dries and plunges him into the Dress-O-Matic, after which he plops into the downstairs kitchen, fully clothed, in time for the automatically prepared tea-and-toast breakfast. 

 

It’s a breathtaking 70 seconds — choreographed to Lorne Balfe and Julian Nott’s exhilarating score, with echoes of the iconic main theme — which sets the tone for future, equally frantic action sequences.