The Tender Bar (15)

JR Moehringer is abandoned by his disc jockey father, aka The Voice, at an early age. The curious youngster grows up in Manhasset, Long Island, surrounded by his determined mother Dorothy, grandparents and warm-hearted uncle Charlie, who manages a pub called The Dickens. When JR reaches the halls of residence as a Yale scholarship student, he faces snobbery because of his background.

LondonNet Film Review
The Tender Bar (15)

Based on the best-selling memoir of JR Moehringer, The Tender Bar is a sweet, engaging but dramatically thin coming-of-age drama seen through the rose-tinted spectacles of a fatherless boy from humble yet hearty beginnings in 1960s Long Island. Director George Clooney makes light work of entertaining, lightweight material, adapted for the screen by William Monahan, who won an Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The only wise guys on screen here are boisterous patrons of a bar managed by the boy’s uncle – a surrogate father figure, who warmly dispenses sobering truths in between lessons on five-card stud. “Don’t try to play sports and don’t think your father is going to save you,” he cheerfully counsels his nephew…

Ben Affleck is handsomely cast as the straight-shooting avuncular sage and savours the film’s showiest role as JR’s profanity-spewing cheerleader and protector. On-screen chemistry with Daniel Ranieri and Tye Sheridan, who play JR at different ages, is warm and cosy, complemented by a colourful supporting turn from Christopher Lloyd as a slovenly grandfather, who scrubs up well and turns on the charm when required. It’s an apt analogy for Clooney’s film, which knows which emotional buttons to gently push to sustain an air of wistful reflection.

JR is abandoned by his disc jockey father, aka The Voice (Max Martini), at an early age. The curious youngster grows up in Manhasset, Long Island, surrounded by his determined mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe), grandparents (Lloyd, Sondra James) and warm-hearted uncle Charlie (Affleck), who manages The Dickens. The pub is a focal point for community life and Charlie proffers words of wisdom from behind the bar, such as when JR is deliberating which subjects to take at Yale to realise his mother’s dream of him becoming a lawyer. “Always take philosophy. You always do well in that because there are no right answers,” pontificates Charlie.

When JR reaches the halls of residence as a Yale scholarship student, he faces snobbery because of his background, most notably when he spends a chilly Christmas in Connecticut with his girlfriend Sidney (Briana Middleton) and her well-to-do parents. “My mother wants me to be a lawyer,” JR politely explains to his hosts over breakfast. “She sounds like a very intelligent woman, if a trifle optimistic,” coldly retorts Sidney’s mother (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) with a withering stare that could curdle every egg on the morning room table.

The Tender Bar doesn’t raise the bar on nostalgic portraits of tainted childhood innocence. Clooney’s picture firmly hits emotional beats in that sweet spot where gentle humour intersects with JR’s fitful self-awakening. Ranieri and Sheridan exude natural liability as they clamber over obstacles in JR’s path, with occasional bunk-ups from Affleck, who carries the film for prolonged periods.

– Kim Hu