Grade: C+
Take an episode of The Wonder Years, stretch it out to feature film length, strip away much of the heart, and you have The Tender Bar – a rote, laborious, methodical march through the thoughtful-young-man-coming-of-age playbook. It is based on a memoir by J.R. Moehringer, which I’d bet is better than this movie. Screenwriter William Monahan and director George Clooney tell the story in the most treacly way possible.
JR and his single mother live in Long Island with his grandparents and Uncle Charlie. JR’s father ran out on them shortly after his birth, but still works as a DJ for various local radio stations. He is known as The Voice. JR likes to listen to him, because he wants to try to find him, but whenever the mother hears him on the radio, she dramatically unplugs it, knocks it over, or destroys it. One wonders why she wouldn’t just change the station. The film jumps back and forth in time, between the mid-late-70s and 1986. This is the kind of world where you happen to see the same stranger on a train – AGAIN – that you saw months or years before. Accents come, go, and suddenly come back, just to remind us that they’re “Lawng Oilandahs.” JR gets accepted into Yale, meets a girl at a party, and by the end of their first scene together, they’ve already sparked up a relationship. There are so many great songs on the soundtrack, which mostly serve as a smokescreen – but I did really enjoy the way 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover was used. There is narration – lots of it – by what I assume was the adult version of JR.
As Uncle Charlie, Ben Affleck will probably get a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. It is the kind of performance awards show voters eat up. He has an accent, a different hairdo, a handful of good lines, and in the later part of the story, he has a beard, to acknowledge the passing of time. He is fine and fun, as shallow entertainment, yet it’s Tye Sheridan (The Card Counter, Ready Player One) as young-adult JR whose sincere, understated, grounded work elevates the film into something I might almost recommend. He gives The Tender Bar more life than anyone else, and I think he is an actor to watch. Christopher Lloyd as Grandpa isn’t given much to do, and Clooney seems to think he will be funny just by sitting there existing, or looking menacingly out the window for no reason.
The Tender Bar ends with JR cruising down a long straight country backroad in a convertible, while Steely Dan plays on the soundtrack, and of course the narrator spoon-feeds us a forced moral. When JR reaches for the radio dial, I was hoping it was to shut this guy up. He’s waiting for his life to begin, or whatever the cliche is. We’re waiting for a hint of original thought.
Grade: C+
Film Reviews by Mark 
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