Billy Crudup Steals ‘Jay Kelly’ Just By Reading a Menu
Early into Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, the titular A-lister—George Clooney, grinning and disarming—has just asked Timothy (Billy Crudup), his old acting-class buddy, to perform a parlor trick. The request feels slightly charged, as though Jay’s poking at a buried wound. They’ve just bumped into each other outside the funeral of a mutual friend, and now the pair sits across from each other at Chez Jay, a nearby Santa Monica bar where selfie-seekers are starting to get a glimpse. The plan is to catch up and reminisce about their youth—back when Jay was a wannabe movie star and before Timothy left the industry disillusioned and become a child therapist. Back when things were equal and hopeful.
As they rehash the past, Jay encourages Timothy to tap back into his Method acting bag and entertain him like old times. “Read the menu,” he says. Timothy humors him. He looks down at the bar’s menu and offers a baseline reading, the same way Crudup used to read Mastercard commercials: steady, dry, neutral. Then things get real. Timothy takes a beat, searching for “an emotional choice,” trying to harness what an old teacher taught him. Soon, he trembles and quivers out the food items: “Truffle parmesan fries. Brussels sprouts with balsamic honey glaze and bacon…” He sobs to the finish line: “Wedge of iceberg lettuce.” It’s so real that Jay doesn’t know whether to be concerned or laugh—until Timothy snaps back to neutral. “That’s Method acting,” he smiles.
It’s a breathtaking, courageous performance—a kind of unpredictable, teary-eyed theater that’s both melodramatic and deeply vulnerable. It’s the fulcrum of the movie. One wrong note and he’s just performing William Shatner dramatic-reading karaoke. Once the tears dry, Timothy picks at a scab that has suddenly reopened, remembering the role they both auditioned for, the one that bifurcated their careers—and lives—forever. The one that turned Jay into a star. Baumbach appropriately repositions the camera on the other side of the table, as if putting his protagonist on the defensive. “You stole my job and you stole my girlfriend,” Timothy says, venomously. “At 23, I didn’t have much more than that.” The invective lingers into the parking lot, where Timothy calls Jay an “empty vessel.” The pair eventually tussle.
The scene asks a lot from Crudup. In eight minutes, he has to reconnect with a friend using flattery, telegraph that Timothy has accepted his lot in life, then show us his unrealized potential, before bringing all that repressed envy bubbling to the surface when Jay refuses to acknowledge his version of the past. This is a seemingly well-adjusted guy with a respectable job, but Crudup has to play both Timothy’s reasonable desire for an apology and his less-healthy impulse to let loose on Jay if he doesn’t get it. It’s the kind of tightrope that would intimidate a lesser actor, but Crudup maintains his balance. In the process, he steals the movie.
Movie theft like this often feels like a lost art. It’s hard to pull off a performative heist without looking selfish or purposefully broad or disrupting the story itself. Even the best examples—Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder and Matthew McConaughey in The Wolf of Wall Street—could be accused of cranking the volume too high. The exceptions tend to be actors playing actors, a looking glass that allows you to compare their choices and get sucked into their transportive power. Think of Elle Fanning’s performance in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. As Rachel Kemp, a famous starlet stepping into the lead role in a Norwegian auteur’s new movie, she earns plenty of screen time. But the moment that still lingers—and eventually glues everything together—arrives during a casual script rehearsal. She reads a passage and begins to break down, moving from facile celebrity to teary, overwhelmed mess. At its conclusion, she embraces her scene partner like she’s just completed a marathon.
