'The Tender Bar' is about as good as it sounds
Claire Folger/ © 2021 Amazon Content Services
George Clooney is human. The only proof of this, however, is how the charming, engaged, generous, highly appealing dude is stunningly unimpressive as a filmmaker. His first movie, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” remains his best by far. Since then his work has rarely risen to the level of good, and usually lands somewhere closer to yeesh. Directing is tough. He’s still learning.
Anyway, the latest evidence, following 2020’s even worse “The Midnight Sky,” is “The Tender Bar,” adapted from J.R. Moehringer’s memoir by Oscar-winning “The Departed” writer William Monahan. Once again Clooney really struggles with momentum; you’ll be done with the story before it’s over, and a lot of that comes from the movie’s inability to identify what is so special about Moehringer’s life that it warranted a memoir. Maybe it reads really well and surely does the proper job of fleshing out the details and characters at the titular bar. On screen, there’s no sense of what makes J.R. (Tye Sheridan) a talented writer or what sets this coming-of age tale from any other saga of absentee fathers and blue-collar climbs up the educational and social ladder. Only when J.R.’s Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) is around does the film jolt to life. Movies like this lend themselves to great supporting turns for characters that the main kid admires, and Affleck, like Sam Rockwell in “The Way Way Back” to name just one, very much conveys why J.R. loves hanging out with him and sees as a surrogate father.
So it’s all a fine hang when we’re in Charlie’s bar or experiencing J.R.’s growth through his uncle’s personality. Otherwise, whether J.R. (played as a kid by Daniel Ranieri and given tiresome narration as an adult by Ron Livingston) copes with his jerk of a dad (Max Martini) or tough-to-read sometimes-girlfriend (Briana Middleton), “The Tender Bar” is merely stale beer. Sometimes there’s a place for that, but only when there’s nothing better around. And the film lacks useful reflection about the versions of manhood presented to him, to say nothing about a less-sitcom-esque version of spending a lot of time in a bar as a kid.
Once again, Clooney has delivered a movie (like “Leatherheads,” “The Ides of March,” and “Monuments Men”) that you will see and shrug and eventually not be entirely sure if you actually did see it when you stream it for five minutes, then doze off.
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