George Clooney’s New Movie On Prime Video

George Clooney’s new movie, The Tender Bar, starring Ben Affleck, Lily Rabe, Daniel Ranieri, Tye Sheridan and Christopher Lloyd, is now on Prime Video, after opening in select movie theaters in the U.S. on December 17, 2021. The Tender Bar is a heart-warming film about the strength that binds family together.

Based on J.R. Moehringer’s memoir and adapted by William Monahan, The Tender Bar tells the story of J.R. and his family. J.R. and his mother live at her parents’ in Long Island. It is a crowded house when the whole family are there, but J.R. doesn’t mind. He prefers it to being alone with his mother. J.R. has an absent father, whose voice he hears regularly on the radio, to the dismay of the rest of the family. J.R. has his Uncle Charlie to teach him the way of the world. He quickly becomes a father-figure to the boy. Through his influence, J.R. discovers that he wants to be a writer. His determined mother though wants him to go to Yale and study law.

The Tender Bar is the same coming-of-age story that has been shown before about a boy looking for a father-figure. The Tender Bar though permeates with the warm glow of nostalgia.

‘Tender’ is the crucial word in George Clooney’s charming adaptation of Moehringer’s memoir. There is a tenderness, even in the more brutal moments, to the way these characters are portrayed. It is the tenderness of remembering, of looking back with affection a past that has now long gone. The film is at its best when it looks at how these disparate characters—from the farting grandfather (played by a great Christopher Lloyd), who wants to appear as if he only begrudgingly supports his children, to the single bartender uncle, who reads a lot and takes care of his nephew as if he were his son—interact and support each other.

The focus, however, of The Tender Bar is the relationship between J.R. and his Uncle Charlie. Much of the film is devoted to showing how these two connect. There is something quite endearing to the way Ben Affleck portrays Uncle Charlie, full of charm and wisdom to impart to his young nephew. But somewhere around the edges, his image starts to fray. This is a man clearly idealized by his nephew, and his depiction in the film suggests exactly that. Charlie still lives with his parents, and works at a bar named The Dickens Bar. J.R. describes him as a self-taught man, honest and straight-shooting. Uncle Charlie spends most of his time in the movie giving J.R. advice that the young man does not always listen to. Over the years, it is a fatherly bond that establishes itself between J.R. and Uncle Charlie.

One of the downsides about this movie is the way Lily Rabe’s character as the mother fades in the background. The film though already foreshadows this in its opening scene, when Mom walks out of frame while J.R. looks on at his Uncle Charlie playing baseball. The film tells us she feels like a failure for moving back in to her childhood home with her parents, and that she is determined her son will have the education she did not receive. But beyond that, the film, and by extension the narrator, her son, appear to have no real interest in her. We, the viewers, for example, never find out what her relationship was like with J.R.’s father, nor what struggle she may have faced as a single mother.

Neither Uncle Charlie nor Mom, or in fact anyone else in the movie, feel like full-fledged characters, but rather like the memory of who they were to J.R., the narrator of this story. This is perhaps where the film strays. Instead of focusing on the dynamic of the family, the film is more interested in showing the coming-of-age journey of a writer—characterized by three different actors, Daniel Ranieri, in an incredible acting debut, who plays J.R. as a boy, Tye Sheridan as a young man, and the narrating voice of Ron Livingston as an older J.R.