Jay Kelly & Boomer Regrets | BFI London Film Festival 2025

We have not evolved as a film industry. We are still paying White Guys™ to write out their bespoke diaries and hire hundreds of people to realise them on celluloid. (STAY WITH ME.)

What's always fascinated me is not that we do this, but that we universalise it, instead of seeing it for what it is – a really cool insight into how White Guys™ are feeling right now. The most sensitive among them are often really good at explaining themselves really well, and in nuanced and beautiful ways. Everything from their childhood trauma to their marriages, their relationships with their kids, all of it. They're truly brilliant at explaining to us, in great detail, the highs and lows of their lives.

No one moreso than Noah Baumbach. (and co-writer Emily Mortimer!)

In Jay Kelly, they use George Clooney – the actor and the idea – to explain the masculine drive for purpose in a beautiful and subtle way. Between Jay and his manager, Ron, we see two approaches to this in great nuance - how the concept of drive and success sit at odds with family, soulfulness and connection. At least, that seems the thesis for me.

It's apparently been a banner year for 'bad dads' on film - "Sentimental Value" is said to tread similar ground. While very little distinguishes it from other explorations of the topic, and I don't think much is added to the conversation – this is perhaps one of the more visceral attempts. The end of the film is a huge gut punch that I couldn't recover from, and it's hard not to tie this to Baumbach's own fatherhood, and "Marriage Story".

I think what White Guys™ are feeling right now is a lot of guilt - guilt they could have prevented by not being cocky 20-somethings and listening not to what their elders said, but how they lived, and what they did. Everyone's trying to work out what the right way to live is, and under White Guys™ feet, "The Way" changed – not because the new way was new, but because society decided to actually value the things it said it valued (community, family, relationship), instead of the things it actually valued (success, money, power). Maybe this shift is temporary, maybe it's a performance for now and not for long, but it's got a lot of old men feeling really woe is me right now.

When you've bet your life on one thing, and the game changes under you, or worse – you realise the game you played was stupid, and the prize is just as stupid – what are you meant to do? That was your one life! Dads from the past would get hardened and say they did it all to provide for the family, to hide from their own grief. Older men of the Modern age are reckoning with the fact they knew better, and did it anyway.

There's also a really fun analysis of "Cancellation" in there that I liked - that was discussed in the context of true accountability vs perception. Jay should have been cancelled in this film, but instead he became a hero - all because one video got out instead of the other.

Overall, if you're a Baumbach fan, or a Clooney/Sandler head, you should add this to your watchlist. Otherwise, I don't know that it's new enough to warrant your rushing.