There is really to smile thinking about how George Clooney tells in The Tender Bar the nascent passion for journalism of little JR and how the craft of writing is presented by the two films of the moment, the futuristic Don’t Look Up and the nineteenth century Lost Illusions (from the novel by Honor de Balzac). Clooney, it must be said, not an insignificant director: the eight films behind him are proof of this. But he often gives in to fashions, follows the trend, stops at cinema-that-people-like-that-like. So it was with the dystopian Suburbicon and science fiction The Midnight Sky. Body for The Tender Bar. Smoothing the hair to the viewer, Clooney tries to tune a boy’s formative years, from Long Island to Yale University, like in a musical score, with the environment that acts as a matrix, imprinting, gym of virtue.
All starting from a bar hell & heaven, where a bizarre, problematic, poetic and prosaic humanity passes by. At the center, three generations and three variations ofamerican dream, according to the indications of the memoir – bestseller signed by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter JR Moehringer and contributor to Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. JR played in the film by two actors: Daniel Ranieri (a talent) as a child and Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) as a boy who in a sequence converse with each other. Clooney follows his little hero’s maturation over a decade or so as he sets out to become an adult: fatherless, raised in a poor family, stuck to the skirts of Dorothy (Rabe), loving single mother but overwhelmed by the double role that life imposes on her, entangled in the relationship with Sydney (Briana Middleton), weaned from his lively grandfather (Christopher Lloyd, the extraordinary Doc of Back to the Future) and above all from his uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) from which he is educated and defended by the Dickens alcohol counter. The name of the bar reflects the love that the host, brother of JR’s mother, has for literature.
Charlie a simple man, convinced that the will to improve is decisive for the path of a young person. Even when looking for the scratchy detail or emotional amplification, Clooney is still a big fan: he adjusts the trick on the complicated existence of people who are satisfied with a tiring normality, dispenses functional ironic cuts to the dialogues and body to a peripheral-universal portrait inspired in part by the atmospheres of Paul Auster’s novels. William Monahan’s screenplay forever sweet, romantic in the classic sense of the term, as stated in the title. P.It was luck, and this time it can be said, that there is Ben Affleck, empathic uncle, point of departure and final destination of the story, good teacher, bruised companion of adventures, father surrogate and wise. Affleck friend for the skin of Clooney and with him he shares the character of Batman interpreted in full continuity. His recovery, after the difficult years of addictions and rehab, is good news for cinema.
THE TENDER BAR at George Clooney
(Usa, 2021, duration 104 ‘)
con Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, Christopher Lloyd, Daniel Ranieri, Max Martini
Rating: *** + out of 5
Your Amazon Prime Video
January 8, 2022 | 10:01
(©) Time.News