“Jay Kelly”: Stars in Their Eyes

I recently heard a sweet story involving a weather delay at a small airport somewhere in the northwest. For various complex reasons, the passengers suddenly had to rely on ground transportation to get to where they were going. What made all the difference was the fact that one of the passengers was the actor Keanu Reeves. Charmingly self-effacing, he befriended his fellow travelers and used his clout to hire the bus that got them all to their destinations. When they finally parted, they felt they had been personally blessed by this close proximity to stardom.

 That’s part of what being a movie star is about: having an appeal that reaches beyond the screen and makes average citizens feel they have a personal relationship with someone who is magic. There’s a similar sort of moment in the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly. In it George Clooney plays a world-famous leading man who seems (on the surface, at least) a whole lot like George Clooney. The episode begins on a European train on which Kelly, instantly recognizable by all the other passengers, charms them with self-deprecating humor. Then a disturbed man grabs the pocketbook of a nice old lady, stops the train, and runs off into the Italian countryside. Without a second’s hesitation, Kelly shifts into heroic mode, as he’s doubtless done in countless popular flicks. He leaps from the train and pursues the thief, finally emerging triumphant with the errant purse, to the huzzahs of all the other passengers. That’s the upside of being famous.

 Baumbach’s film (co-written by the talented British actress Emily Mortimer) shows us the downside too: the toll stardom takes on one’s family life, as well as the skewed sense of self that develops when the star is always encircled by a fawning entourage. The film certainly conveys the difficulties faced when an ageing celebrity is no longer so clear about his path forward, and we do feel a certain sympathy for a nice-guy leading man who’s starting to be tired of the usual clamor of expectations. But I found myself (as various critics groups have done) even more interested in the hangers-on who pay a price for their loyalty to the great man. The second lead in this film is played by Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-time manager. He’s a guy who puts family obligations (and pretty much everything else) second to his duties as Jay’s companion, fixer, office wife, and general factotum. Yes, he’s even been known to touch up the star’s greying temples, when necessary. Now he’s left his own kids at home with an increasingly resentful wife (played by Baumbach’s own wife, Greta Gerwig) while he and Jay schlepp around Europe to attend a gala tribute event that Jay had previously turned down, but then mercurially changed his mind about at the very last minute. Sandler, who’s long since graduated from the childish comedies that first made his reputation, has already won some performance awards for this role, and I suspect there’ll be more.

The movie’s certainly a reflection on the price of stardom. And non-stardom: there’s a small but important subplot about the young Jay’s talented buddy who, through the kind of fluke with which the film industry is rife, never gets the chance to move ahead in his career. This is not Baumbach’s best film: its time-jumps and on-the-nose plotting detract from the kind of tightly-focused artistry he generally brings to projects like Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale. Still, even if it doesn’t reach the starry heights, this is a film worth pondering.

 

 

 

Tuning in to the White Noise

My online dictionary explains the phrase “white noise” as “a steady, unvarying, unobtrusive sound, [such] as an electronically produced drone or the sound of rain, used to mask or obliterate unwanted sounds.”  White Noise is also the name of a new Netflix film by Noah Baumbach, based on a 1985 Dom DeLillo novel. The talented Baumbach, known as the writer/director of such quirky but highly emotional films as 2006’s The Squid and the Whale and 2019’s Marriage Story, here works at capturing DeLillo’s  darkly comic sensibility, the better to convey the absurdity of everyday life.

 It’s not often that what sticks in your mind at the end of a film is the footage under the closing credits. Though White Noise, in re-creating 1980s suburbia, frequently sets scenes in the aisles of the gleaming local supermarket, I wouldn’t have guessed that this is where we would end up at the final fadeout. After all, the story has big things on its mind, like academic rivalries, an “airborne toxic event” leading to mass evacuations, covert drug use, betrayal, and even attempted murder. But when push comes to shove, everyone has to eat, right? And—as the credits roll—the well-behaved shoppers at the local A&P (product placement is rife in White Noise) suddenly begin to dance, lofting rolls of toilet paper, exuberantly tossing plastic bags in the air, engaging a fellow  cart-pusher in an exuberant pas de deux in the produce aisle.  

 The first thing you notice as the film begins is the clamor and the clatter of everyday speech, which permeates the household of Jack Gidney. He’s played by Baumbach stalwart Adam Driver,  who is here dressed and made up to look as paunchy and unattractively middle-aged as possible. Baumbach doesn’t play favorites; his longtime partner, Greta Gerwig, takes the role of Jack’s wife, and she too is shot to look frazzled and angst-ridden. Part of the tension stems from their complicated family life: Jack has been married four times, and the four kids who help make up the teeming household are generally at odds, partly because although each of them comes from a different relationship, they are all expected to meld into a convivial family unit. And so they do—at times, such as when that mysterious toxic event forces them out into the potentially lethal  countryside.

 Meanwhile, Jack is troubled by his wife’s mysterious behavior, and even by his own career choices. As the world’s leading authority on Hitler Studies, he’s trying not to own up the fact that he knows no German. And then there’s Murray, his campus frenemy (Don Cheadle), who envies Jack’s fame and would like to be receiving similar recognition for his own Elvis Studies expertise. Will Jack’s dramatic appearance in front of Murray’s students help lift Murray’s campus prestige?  Or will it destroy any ties of friendship between two ambitious iconoclasts? Do we care? Maybe not, but Baumbach’s overall aim is to point up the ridiculousness of their goals.

 If you like tightly-structured films that head inexorably in one direction, building at last to a powerful conclusion, White Noise is not for you. This film meanders from place to place, ricocheting between ideas and styles. Some critics have applauded; others have not been charmed. I like a comment from David Ehrlich of IndieWire  who called the results of Baumbach’s work here “equal parts inspired and exasperating.”  Personally, I miss both the sweetness and the character complexity of Marriage Story. But White Noise is provocative and definitely not dull. And it has made me look at my local supermarket in an entirely new way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marriage Stories: The Coupling of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig

It’s well known among film buffs that Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig are a couple. They’re also the parents of a baby boy, born last March, just after she completed filming of Little Women. No indication, though, that these two golden Hollywood folks (both of whom are up for 2020 Best Screenplay Oscars), have wedding plans. In much of today’s America (as in many nations around the world) the stigma of bearing a child out of wedlock has rapidly disappeared. Little Harold is not likely to face social stigma for being what used to be called a bastard. Today the term has a far different, far more metaphoric, connotation, referring to a person’s character rather than his or her parentage. It’s all indicative of how much the matrimonial state itself has evolved over the course of our lifetimes.

Both Baumbach and Gerwig are Oscar nominees for writing (though not, alas, for directing) major films that look at marriage with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Baumbach, who was previously responsible for 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, seems to have taken much to heart his own parents’ divorce when he was an adolescent. That film focuses on the impact of the parents’ split on 16-year-old Walt, who starts acting out at school when his mother and father take on new romantic partners. Baumbach has never hidden the fact that the details of the story match in many way his own family experience.

Though Baumbach’s Marriage Story seems further away from autobiography, it too explores the price that is paid by the entire family once parents separate, even when they mean their split to be amicable. The film begins by acknowledging the psychic cost to all concerned, then plunges us into the additional pain inflicted once attorneys get involved. It’s not a pretty picture, even despite the best of intentions. The American legal system, in fact, seems almost designed to make everything worse. One saving grace: time may not heal all wounds, but it does help those most intimately affected move on and learn to live in new ways

Then there’s Gerwig’s take on Little Women. Louisa May Alcott’s famous nineteenth-century novel for girls of course endorses conventional values, including the blessings of matrimony. The novel is surprisingly frank in recognizing that girls without money—and this describes Alcott’s semi-autobiographical March sisters—must needs consider being on the lookout for wealthy suitors. Alcott’s book hardly endorses this point of view, but makes it clear that Meg (the pretty eldest sister who marries for love) sometimes suffers over what she cannot afford. Then there’s Jo. Everyone who’s read the novel knows that Jo, having spurned the charming Laurie as a husband, finally finds romantic happiness with a kind of Germanic deus ex machina: a kind, jolly German professor who encourages her literary talents and allows her to live a married life that’s slightly outside the realm of convention. Jo of course is Alcott’s own alter ego, but Alcott herself never married. Instead she devoted her adult life to her writing career and to fulfilling the needs of her extended family.

Gerwig’s version of Little Women encourages us to see the close relationship of Jo March to her creator. Without distorting the original story, she reminds us of how dedicated Jo is to the notion of career over matrimony. So how does she reconcile her clearly feminist perspective with the ending Alcott herself wrote? It seems wrong to spoil the film by going into detail, but Gerwig’s Jo (while doing what needs to be done) ultimately remains true to her independent self.

Marriage Story: The Sun Comes Up, I Think About You

Stephen Sondheim, composer/lyricist of arcane but wonderful Broadway musicals, is certainly having a moment at the movies. In the delightful Knives Out, Daniel Craig as Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc casually warbles “Losing My Mind” from Sondheim’s Follies.  It’s an odd, unlikely plot detail, but one that seems – upon reflection – to provide a whimsical clue to the film’s ending. Then there’s Noah Baumbach’s masterful Marriage Story. Writer/director Baumbach, whose previous credits include The Squid and the Whale, would seem to be the poet of dissolving marriages. He approaches the story of Charlie and Nicole Barber with even-handed but compassionate restraint. It’s a film that’s deeply moving, disturbing, but still somehow hopeful.

Sondheim songs come into Marriage Story late in the game, providing a pivot from the marital spat that’s the absolute nadir of the crumbling relationship into at least a guarded optimism. The husband and wife in question are both show folks (he a much-honored avant-garde stage director, she an actress blessed with star quality), and so it’s perhaps not surprising to see them stand up and perform in public. Scarlett Johansson, as Nicole, joins Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever in a spirited off-the-cuff rendition of Sondheim”s  perky “You Can Drive a Person Crazy,” from Company.  It’s a sign, perhaps, that Nicole has moved past the anger she’s felt toward her ex-spouse for thwarting her own professional dreams. Immediately thereafter, on the other side of the continent, Adam Driver’s Charlie rises from a table at a local watering hole and delivers a heartfelt  rendition of the plaintive but affirmative “Being Alive,” the climactic solo from the same show. He’s still hurting, we know, but he’ll move on.

Charlie and Nicole at first both claim to want a no-fault divorce, one that will allow them to separate firmly but gracefully, while still remaining friends. That’s, of course, before their lawyers get into the act. The legal profession does not come off well in these proceedings. The divorce attorneys (Laura Dern for her, first Alan Alda and then Ray Liotta for him) reduce a relationship into a pitched battle. In angling for their clients to emerge victorious, they twist every quirk and misstep into an indication of the other side’s culpability. Of course it quickly gets ugly.

The reason for lawyering up has everything to do with the one person who has no say in the matter, Charlie and Nicole’s eight-year-old son. Nicole wants young Henry with her in L.A., where she’s returning to her roots by starring in a TV series. Charlie insists Henry belongs where he’s always been, in New York City. In this, Marriage Story makes a fascinating contrast to an earlier award-winning film about a custody battle,1979’s  Kramer vs. Kramer. In that New York-based film, a mother who feels stifled by domestic life suddenly decamps for the west coast, leaving her husband to cope single-handed with young Billy. The focus of Kramer vs. Kramer is how that father, a standard busy-young-exec type played by Dustin Hoffman, learns to expand his life to take over full-time parenting chores. Just when he’s been transformed by his new responsibilities, the wife (newcomer Meryl Streep) re-appears, suing for custody on the grounds that as mother she deserves to be the custodial parent.

Marriage Story has a more complex, and doubtless more modern, view of a father’s role. Charlie is a man who’s always loved tending to the needs of his son. He doesn’t have to be taught about fatherhood. The question is: can both he and Nicole remain active parents without striking a kind of Solomonic bargain?