“The Tender Bar” on Amazon: Wisdom at the counter – culture

It’s such a thing with mildness. As a character trait it is extremely pleasant, but rather unsuitable as an engine for a drama. You could have guessed that George Clooney exaggerated mildness in his new director’s work “The Tender Bar” when you saw in the trailer how Ben Affleck hugged little Daniel Ranieri as if he were a cuddly toy. Sweet. Looks like you’ve got Clooney for your last movie the end and ice age drama “The Midnight Sky”, accused of being too pessimistic about a pandemic, and now he’s trying to paint things in a lovelier light. It was a success – you can spend a wonderful hour and a half with “The Tender Bar”. But not much more, and one would like to say: Clooney’s best work is not.

The screenwriter William Monahan, who wrote Marti Scorsese’s “The Departed” among others, adapted the childhood memories of the American journalist and writer JR Moehringer for Clooney’s film. Moehringer, born in 1964, tells in “The Tender Bar” how he and his mother moved to Long Island to live with his grandfather as a little boy in the 1970s. For himself it’s wonderful, for his mother the admission that she couldn’t make it out into the world. For JR, his Uncle Charlie will be a better father than his own could ever have been, because Uncle Charlie has very clear ideas about how men should be. Among other things, they meet their maintenance obligations and do not abandon their children.

You will meet the devil, the professor tells the students in the classroom

The title is a play on words: It’s not about an affectionate bar, the lovely bar tender is Charlie, played by Ben Affleck, and he’s a really charming character: He has a pub on Long Island where everyone feels comfortable, although the job doesn’t suit Charlie at all. Charlie is well-read, self-taught in everything, and one who values ​​education beyond measure. But actually it’s not about Uncle Charlie, but about JR, played by Daniel Ranieri as a child and by Tye Sheridan as a young man. The child has to go to Yale, his mother finds, the only antidote to her own botched life that she can think of.

You will meet the devil, the professor tells the students in the classroom, but JR probably doesn’t know what he means by that, at least he feels quite overwhelmed when he arrives at Yale. He should really know what Homer wrote and when, but for the time being he doesn’t even know who it is.

The story with the devil falls through the rust. It comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Amory, the hero of his novel “This Side of Paradise” sees his grimace in the window during his time at Princeton, and this diabolical encounter can be interpreted in different ways. Armory wants to leave it all behind, but whatever he does and wherever he goes, the devil is always on his heels. JR is like one of Fitzgerald’s heroes, he pursues a vague self-optimization to please a woman, Amory loves Isabelle, Gatsby tries to impress his Daisy, and JR worked for Yale for years only to get his heart out to a student to hang in wealthier people who don’t give a damn about him. And then it takes him quite a while until he knows again that he is not studying for others, but above all to become the person he wants to be.

The film is a little sweet, but maybe that’s the flavor that is currently preferred

Uncle Charlie’s masculinity analyzes are helpful – and extremely contemporary, although they come from the feminist seventies, which are not exactly flawless. The result is a bit sweet, but maybe that’s just the current preferred flavor. In any case, it is perfectly clear what else was of interest to Clooney in Moehringer’s bestseller: It takes a look at a world that no longer exists. The references to the cinema of the seventies have always fascinated him, but playing around with screen screens, the yellow cast of the images, the enchanted town on Long Island actually represent a lost paradise. “The Tender Bar” is set at the beginning of the Reagan era in the eighties, the last offshoot of a brief epoch in which people whose parents are not millionaires could afford an education at an Ivy League university without going into debt . You could be the first to get out of here on your own, says Grandpa Christopher Lloyd to JR.But that’s not entirely true: American society was more permeable at the time, and with a good education, a boy like JR, scion of a dynasty, could grow up failed existences, still becoming something.

Trailer for the film:

The story lacks stability, somewhere between nostalgia, the celebration of family cohesion, the devil’s longing and Uncle Charlie’s men’s studies, Clooney loses the thread that holds Moehringer’s memories together. “The Tender Bar” is like an endless trailer for a film with wonderful and wonderfully played characters, but which you then never see. In the credits there is a beach excursion among men, and then the thought can occur that it is not the loveliness that troubles “The Tender Bar”, but a wrong focus. Less JR, more Uncle Charlie. Clooney would still have made a feel-good movie. But one with a little more bite.

The tender bar, USA 2021 – Directed by George Clooney. Screenplay: William Monahan, based on the memoir by JR Moehringer. Camera: Martin Ruhe. With: Tye Sheridan, Ben Affleck, Daniel Ranieri, Lily Rabe, Christopher Lloyd. 104 minutes, available on Prime Video.