With George Clooney directing and Ben Affleck co-starring, The Tender Bar is a boozy coming-of-age drama that serves up one shot of warm-hearted charm for every two shots of sentimental cliché. Adapted by William Monahan (The Departed) from the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 memoir by J.R. Moehringer, Clooney’s eighth foray behind the camera rewinds back to the 1970s and 1980s to chronicle 15 years in the life of a young man from an unorthodox working-class family in small-town Long Island. World premiering at the BFI London Film Festival this week ahead of theatrical release in December, this Amazon-backed production then makes its streaming debut on Prime in January.
Opening in 1973, the film’s first act finds embattled single mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) and her nine-year-old son J.R. (Daniel Ranieri) moving back into the ramshackle, overcrowded family home run by an eccentric grandfather (Christopher Lloyd) and grandmother (Sondra James). Already long out of the picture, the boy’s biological father (Max Martini) is a hot-headed, hard-drinking radio DJ who rarely makes the effort to see his son, forever palming him off with broken promises and fleeting visits. But luckily for J.R., his stand-in father figure is the roguishly charming uncle Charlie (Affleck), who owns a popular bar well-stocked with books. The boy soon becomes a regular fixture in this unusual drinking den, a place where everybody knows his name.
Besides schooling J.R. in essential “male sciences” such as responsible drinking and treating women with respect, chain-smoking smoothie Charlie also encourages the boy’s nascent intellectual curiosity and voracious reading tastes, priming him for Dorothy’s all-consuming ambition that he attend an upscale Ivy League college. Already foreshadowed by some minor intercutting between timelines, the story then jumps forward by a decade, with the older J.R. (Tye Sheridan) landing a place at Yale. Here he learns more crucial life skills, including the bittersweet joys of first love with classmate Sydney (Brianna Middleton), a sophisticated beauty from a wealthy Connecticut family, who proves to be both sexually liberated and cruelly unreliable.
On leaving Yale, even after scoring a prestigious writing gig at the New York Times, J.R. continues to obsess over his on-off affair with Sydney and unresolved issues with his absent father. With Charlie still acting as his unofficial life coach, he finally tracks down his deadbeat dad for a fateful, long-brewing, Oedipal confrontation that confirms his graduation to full emotional maturity, at least according to the film’s simplistic narrative schema,
Fashioned as an inspirational celebration of blue-collar heartland Americana, The Tender Bar pushes some wearily familiar buttons. Monahan’s screenplay aspires to the hard-bitten authenticity of a Raymond Carver anthology, or at least a Bruce Springsteen album, but it too often delivers stiffly drawn characters and tinny jukebox sentimentality. Clooney clearly finds soulful depths in this ultra-masculine milieu of booze, baseball and bar-room banter, but he fails to sell its charms. The lingering wounds of father-son conflict, the romanticised fantasy of a writer’s life, the social-climbing triumphalism behind the American Dream: all these themes have been explored on screen innumerable times before, and neither Clooney nor Monahan bring anything really fresh to the party.
In performance terms, The Tender Bar is a rare and pleasing showcase for Affleck the actor rather than Affleck the star. The 24-year-old Sheridan also gets to flex his emotional range, while moon-faced cutie Ranieri makes an auspicious debut. But there is too little breathing space here for the secondary cast members, with veteran screen icon Lloyd reduced to a clownish caricature and Martini saddled with a shlocky stage-villain role. The female characters are particularly flat, either self-sacrificing martyrs or Academic Pixie Dream Girls. The Bechdel Test was always more sly critique than serious cinematic measuring tool, but Monaghan’s screenplay fails it anyway.
As an audio-visual experience, The Tender Bar gorges on the gas-guzzling cars, gaudy fashions and radio hits of the period in a splashy, sub-Scorsese style. The retro soundtrack mixtape runs the gamut from Golden Earring to Jackson Browne, Paul Simon and Chic. A colour palette rich in golden earth-tones gives everything the nostalgic glow of those long-lost, half-imagined summers of yesteryear, But otherwise, Clooney’s cautious direction and Martin Ruhe’s artless cinematography lack visual panache. Interiors look stagey, camerawork is jumpy and unsteady in a way that feels clumsy rather than purposely loose. There are low-key pleasures and witty lines to savour here, but the whole project feels oddly passionless and conservative. The real Moehringer, incidentally, is currently ghostwriting Prince Harry’s memoirs, which is arguably a happy ending of sorts.
Director: George Clooney
Screenwriter: William Monahan, from the memoir by J.R. Moehringer
Cast: Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, Christopher Lloyd, Daniel Ranieri, Max Martini, Rhenzy Feliz, Briana Middleton, Max Casella, Sondra James, Michael Braun, Matthew Delamater, Bill Meleady, Mark Boyett, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Shannon Collis
Producers: Grant Heslov, George Clooney, Ted Hope
Cinematography: Martin Ruhe
Editing: Tanya Swerling
Production designer: Kalina Ivanov
Costume designer: Jenny Eagan
Music: Dara Taylor
Production companies: Smokehouse Pictures (US), Double Hope Films (US), Grand Illusion Films (US)
Venue: London Film Festival (Love section)
106 minutes
