“When I look at you, I see my whole life!”
This is what a stranger says to Jay Kelly (George Clooney) on a train in Italy. The man has never met Jay, but he still feels he knows him. Jay is a movie star, and movie stars are (or, at least they used to be) useful as a metric for the passage of time. This man associates different moments of his life with different Jay Kelly movies. Seeing the man in person is surreal, a flash of those moments all at once.
But if that’s what we see when we look at movie stars, it begs the question: what do they see when they look in the mirror? Jay Kelly sees the stars that came before him. He stares at himself, fitting his own name into the lineage of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Robert De Niro. He knows nothing about the inner lives of these men; nothing about their character, their relationships, their integrity. But that notoriety, that persona – that’s what he wants.
Read Sammie’s full review on Rough Draft
