The true trick of the marquee name is understanding the specific mechanism of fame: the draw of the appointed man. Jay Kelly was anointed, not necessarily by virtue of disciplined craft, but by a combination of luck and sheer looks and the singular, ineffable quality that made people crave proximity to his screen presence.
Timothy might have been the better actor, the Method man, but Jay was the movie star. This kind of celebrity cannot be taught, only recognized, and the recipient might rightly begin to fret that the ease of acquisition means the reward is undeserved.
When George Clooney attempted the leap to the varsity league, transitioning from television’s secure rhythms, the movie roles he landed often misjudged his actual capacity.
His early filmography, a precarious stretch of mid-90s efforts, shows the difficulty in translating inherent charm into cinematic gravitas. Steven Spielberg, watching him work on the set of *ER*, offered one small, critical mechanical fix: stop moving the head so much when delivering the line. A subtle note about the lack of stillness, perhaps, suggesting the need for less visible effort.
He was a middling romantic lead in *One Fine Day* (1996), certainly matching Michelle Pfeiffer in sheer handsomeness but coming off, critically, as interchangeable, a beautiful stand-in. Then there was the infamous failure of *Batman & Robin* (1997), a camp disaster that cast him as an infamously lousy Bruce Wayne, a professional stumble he has since transformed into a recurring, self-deprecating bit of necessary talk-show theater. He also played a competent intelligence officer in *The Peacemaker* (1997), entirely forgettable, a standard operative who could have been airlifted in from countless other military thrillers.
He was no David Caruso, whose post-*NYPD Blue* screen ambitions evaporated spectacularly, but looking back at those immediate post-*ER* pictures, it is not difficult to conjure a world where Clooney’s luminescence simply fizzled out by the close of the decade. Effortless charisma, it turns out, is insufficient insurance for a movie worth watching.
The light sometimes just needs more to burn on.
It's a party trick, but it's also a line that the film draws between the types of performers the two men represent.Alternative viewpoints and findings: See here
