The bar of great hopes arrives on Amazon Prime, the new film directed by George Clooney, accompanied by a promising cast. The story is taken from the novel The Tender Bar: A Memoir, written by JR Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, also known for having collaborated in the writing of Open, the biography of André Agassi. In the Italian translation, that “tender” is lost, which will save the protagonist and lead him to a worthy life. Because to have hope, you also need a lot of tenderness first.
The film tells about his childhood and the start of his career as a writer. We meet him as a child, while his mother is returning to her unloved paternal nest, in Manhasset, Long Island (close and yet very far from New York), after too many failures during his attempt to build an independent life. Little JR’s father is absent, just a distant voice bouncing off the radios, because he’s a DJ by trade, but he’s an unreliable alcoholic. The grandfather shows himself as a gruff and closed man, but he is the fulcrum of a large family that revolves around him in spite of himself.
In his two-story house, dilapidated and in need of maintenance but full of life and affection, JR finds a stability, an emotional support that will direct him towards his future, despite the shadows of the past. This will happen thanks to the constant moral support of the mother, the support of the rough grandfather and above all thanks to uncle Charlie, the uncle we all would like to have, entrusted to an excellent Ben Affleck, who runs the Dickinson, a family bar-home where on books alternate shelves with bottles, a self-taught man who runs his restaurant as if it were a ship in the storm to which those in need can cling.
After some sweaty victories and some defeats, JR will understand that despite all the support of the world, in the end it is you who must help yourself, get up and act, thanks to that support that has distant roots but from which you have developed. Needless to say, it will be indispensable to close the accounts with the father figure, who embodies the most devastating figure of the harmful but seductive parent, often only a narcissistic egoist, who while digging wounds that will hardly heal, manages to be loved so much as to cause in the child. -victim sense of guilt, if and when he will free himself.
It really seems that from peaceful childhoods, from unproblematic family relationships, from economic well-being, artistic careers cannot spring, certainly not from writers. For each one, the story that is happening to him is unique and unrepeatable, unfortunately we spectators (and readers) of stories like this have heard many, often become films. And nothing in JR’s path differs from others. A difficult childhood but blessed with an important guiding figure; the individual and class redemption to be entrusted to the studio, combined with some artistic skills; the small castrating province that forces abandonment; the formative defeats; the milestone of graduating from Yale, which then really meant a real possibility.
To read the plot, everything is a cliché, everything has already been seen and heard and therefore the arduous road to success must be so for many, at least in the creative field. However, this does not make watching the film any more exciting, which has the advantage of only lasting 104 minutes and is directed in his usual traditional style by George Clooney, who has never been an innovative on that side. But here the material lends itself, in a meticulous and affectionate reconstruction of the environment and atmospheres of a Long Island of the ’70s and then’ 80s, with the warm photography of Martin Ruhe (already with Clooney in the Comma 22 series) and the nice selection of songs.
And a cliché is also the disastrous childhood, the anomalous environment of almost only men in which the little JR will grow up, the bar-home-mother’s womb, the first disastrous unrequited love for a richer girl, the many cigarettes and whiskeys with the risk of becoming a bar fly, some illness among his loved ones, the almost obligatory passage for a great newspaper, with its editors in turmoil, an inexhaustible forge of new talents to hire and cultivate (today it seems like science fiction).
All this is staged with great pleasure and yet without much vitality and little emotional involvement. The best thing about the film, which however only lasts 104 minutes, is undoubtedly Ben Affleck, who is really good at his role, with a minimal acting that makes him authentic and makes her the real protagonist of the film. A banal note can be made regarding the choice of the two actors who play the protagonist as a child and as a twenty-year-old, two faces that could not be more different, are the very good Daniel Ranieri as a child and Tye Sheridan, not very empathetic, as a teenager and young man. Max Martini is the hateful father. The mother a bit ‘out of the way is Lily Rabe, as always towering in her few scenes Christopher Lloyd.
If a sentence can remain, after the vision of this film, it is a message that really seems out of time today, but it makes us understand how the author and also the director believe in it. When JR briefly encounters a young girl who is harassed by her detestable father, she asks him how to escape, travel and see places. And he replies: “you have to study and do very well in school”. Phrase worthy of a gloriously old-fashioned film and that for this reason you will be very pleased or unhappy.
#Tender #Bar #Review #bar #high #hopes