Mark Reviews Movies: THE TENDER BAR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 16, 2021

There's a circular logic to the supposed importance of the story of The Tender Bar. This is the story of a kid, who decides he wants to become a writer at a relatively early age, becoming a young man, who can't quite figure out what story he should write. What a convenience it is, then, that the story our protagonist decides to pen is that of himself, as a kid, who figures out he wants to be a writer, and a young man, spending so much time dallying on the kind of story he should put into words—even though the real story has been right in front of and behind him all along.

The simplification of the arc and purpose of this real-life tale, based on J.R. Moehringer's same-titled memoir, is a bit of a joke—but only just a bit. Within the world of this movie, the story exists, both because Moehringer knew he could write it and, as presented in a couple of amusing but telling asides in William Monahan's screenplay adaptation, because the trend in publishing had been moving toward memoir.

Forget that Moehringer's book was published in 2005, which is about two decades after the movie story's own timeline, and that the character's career as a writer only really begins at this story's end. None of that future struggle and discovery really matters to this story, which looks back fondly on all of the people and events that led to its own existence—as a fond looking-back at people and events that inspired it. One really cannot escape the circle created by the book, Monahan's screenplay, and director George Clooney's inattentive focus.

If there's a deeper theme here, it's family, maybe. J.R. (played by Daniel Ranieri as a precocious kid and Tye Sheridan as a college student/young professional) spends a lot of time reminiscing about the family he knows—and one member who only exists as a faraway voice and an up-close source of not-too-hidden resentment.

The boy and his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) are forced to move in with her immediate family in Long Island, after she hits some financial trouble and can no longer pay rent. Mom wants a lot more than this for her son—a solid education all the way through law school and a lucrative career as an attorney. While young J.R. goes about his everyday life, the house bustles with spirited conversation, the droll comments from an emotionally detached grandfather (played by Christopher Lloyd), and the occasional sneaking away to listen to his absentee father Johnny (Max Martini), a radio DJ appropriately nicknamed "the Voice."

The name J.R. is technically meant to be the shortened form of "junior," but the whole family refuses to acknowledge that fact (J.R.'s grandmother, played by Sondra James, goes so far as to break the family radio before the boy can hear his father's voice). An older J.R., realizing that his story needs an emotional and thematic through line for some sense of closure, eventually confronts his old man, and yes, it definitely gives a storyline intentionally kept on the sidelines the feeling of closure it has earned—which is to say not much at all.

In between, a younger and older J.R. learns life lessons from his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck), a bar owner and autodidact, who introduces the kid to what seems like the entirety of literature in the uncle's packed closet and the shelves behind the bar. Charlie, obviously, is a surrogate father figure for the boy, and most of the character's significance comes from how unflappably honest and affectionate Affleck is in the role. The lessons—making sure not to spend all of one's cash on booze, not giving other people power over one's opinion of oneself, how to cope with the unrequited love of college classmate Sidney (Briana Middleton)—are fine enough for the nostalgic vagueness of this story. The attitude means more.

The whole of the tale follows the kid, within the eccentricities of the family and the absence of the father, and the young man, through his time with friends and pining for the emotionally distant Sidney at Yale and beyond. There's a rambling sense of narrative to this, which is to be expected given the objective of the source material, but the aimless sense of purpose as to what's guiding J.R.'s story—the family, the love story, the shattered relationship with the father, the job at a newspaper, the career he says he wants but only goes for in the movie's final minutes—prevents The Tender Bar from having much of, well, an actual, meaningful purpose.

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