Ben Affleck is the only thing remotely intoxicating about George Clooney’s The Tender Bar
This memoir adaptation is almost pointless enough to induce nostalgia for Clooney’s more self-important awards bait
What is it about attending Yale that makes people feel compelled to write entire memoirs explaining how they got there and what happened when they arrived? The Tender Bar, adapted from a memoir by J.R. Moehringer, is a somewhat less insufferable origin story than Hillbilly Elegy, but it’s scarcely more urgent—at least not in its big-screen telling. Holding most of its characters at a solipsistic remove, this is an extended personal essay in search of an application.
The applicant is the movie’s J.R., who takes on those initials to avoid the moniker “Junior,” and is supposedly in a constant search for his deadbeat father, Johnny (Max Martini). Johnny left J.R.’s mother (Lily Rabe) early, and as a professional disc jockey in confusingly high demand, he remains forever a “voice on the radio” for his mostly abandoned son. When J.R. is a boy, played by Daniel Ranieri, his weary but caring mom totes him back to her family home on Long Island, where his cantankerous grandfather (Christopher Lloyd) presides over a revolving cast of boisterous relatives.
This group includes J.R.’s Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck), a local bartender and imparter of wisdom about the “male sciences.” Both a reader and a heavy drinker, Charlie offers advice both sensible (“don’t look for your father to save you”) and prescriptive (“don’t play sports,” cutting to the core of J.R.’s limited athletic abilities), all of which the movie romanticizes. He also points his nephew in the direction of books, which inspire his passion for writing—we’re told, anyway, because The Tender Bar keeps any tricky details of the creative process confined to a haze of vague barroom philosophizing.
In short, Uncle Charlie is the father that J.R. never had—so kind, warm, and aware of the story’s themes that he undermines the father-son estrangement that’s supposed to provide the movie’s dramatic backbone. Having established almost immediately that J.R.’s biological father is worthless and Uncle Charlie will step into that role, The Tender Bar dithers around as a kid grows into a mildly angsty young man (Tye Sheridan) who receives a coveted Yale scholarship. Escaping his roots, he then spends most of his undergraduate years pining after rich girl Sidney (Briana Middleton). Finally, a riveting peek into a young man’s crush on an aloof and emotionally unavailable woman!