The Tender Bar (George Clooney, 2021) wr. William Monahan, adapted from the memoir by JR Moehringer; Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan (as JR), narrated by Ron Livingston
John Joseph 'JR' Moehringer is a writer of memoirs, usually other people's. The next one is going to be that of Harry Windsor, a very rich Englishman who had the choice of literally almost any woman in the world and chose to marry a minor star from some American TV show, an African-American from a broken home. At least she didn't already have kids.
The Tender Bar is I suppose the prototype of Moehringer's later 'memoirs': it's his own memoir. It's about him in his early 20s, so there wasn't much to tell.
His father is absent (that's a plot point, by the way - just about the only one) and he lives with his mother at his grandfather's house. (The Grandpa is played by Christopher Lloyd, which is a bonus: he was born 1938, but still sparkles, though understandably less than in Back to the Future, 1985-1990.) He is influenced most by his mother's brother Charlie (Ben Affleck) who runs the bar in the title.
The word 'tender' might mean something slightly different in Long Island than it does in Western Australia - or perhaps I have a undimensional idea about bars from watching too many movies in which people get drunk in them and make bad decisions. ... Anyway, in this one apparently all the men are good guys and love each other and love young JR and compete to buy him drinks at each one of his successes, such as getting into Yale.
How exactly he achieves that is not explained, by the way; he doesn't look very bright to me. There is, however, a younger version of him earlier in the movie, and he is very good at some word game I hadn't heard of. So I suppose that's a hint at the secret of his success. Both the child and the young man are quite unprepossessing, which didn't help my enjoyment of the story.
Nothing much happens. Everyone drinks a lot. There's a girl of course, but she marries someone else. The last scene I can remember has all the guys on the beach lying in the UV getting melanomas, all apparently drunk - including our hero. ... It's a day after I've seen the film, and I'm having trouble remembering anything useful to say about it. ...
One thing I do remember is that the African-American chick with whom he gets into the sack much too easily has curly hair in the first half of the film but has it straightened in the second. No-one mentions it. I guess it 'was the style at the time', as Grampa Simpson would have said.
Oh ... another thing I remember is that one of the professors (another African-American) in whose class the protagonist is sitting one day (not listening) is talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which he personally has translated, and he's starting a lecture beginning with the fact that the Iliad is written in dactylic hexameter. I would have like to have listened to ten minutes of that, but we only get ten seconds.
One thing of which there is too much (rather than too little) is the fact that the main character 'goes by' JR, and that it means Junior and is spelt without punctuation (though I notice that Wikipedia - like the New York Times - insists on what the Americans call periods - as 'J.R.') There's a theme running through the whole story about the father being absent.
'Junior' means that the son has the identical name as the father, and Moehringer, whose full name is actually John Joseph, was the son of another John Joseph Moehringer. He was a DJ whose on-air name was Johnny Michaels; he died in 2002. He's called 'The Voice' in the memoir and film. He's 'in the radio'. I suppose the JR = 'Junior' thing is a way of drawing attention to the absence of the father - even of his name - and therefore the presence of the substitute father figures in the 'tender bar'.
You've probably gathered from my endless waffling that I didn't like this movie's self-indulgence in an uninteresting person/character, and that I was completely underwhelmed thereby.
historyvshollywood with pix of real peeps/actors
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 9 February, 2022 | Now: 10 February, 2022