The Tender Bar (2021)
(Daniel Ranieri as the young JR and Lily Rabe as JR’s mother Dorothy in The Tender Bar)
The Tender Bar (2021)
(Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video)
I’ve seen three remarkable performances from younger actors this season: Saniyya Sidney as the teenaged tennis prodigy Serena Williams in King Richard, Jude Hill as a 9-year-old witness to roiling Irish history in Belfast, and Woody Norman as a precocious 10-year-old roaming cross-country with his vagabond uncle in C’mon, C’mon.
All three aimed fervent, unfaked laughter and pain straight toward the camera, and carried as much weight as the older actors alongside them. To them I can now add Daniel Ranieri as the younger embodiment of the central figure in The Tender Bar, directed by George Clooney from a script by William Monahan (adapted from a bestselling memoir by J. R. Moehringer).
Ranieri plays JR, short for “Junior”, son of a man he’s seen only once early in his life. In 1973 JR is 11 years old when he and his careworn mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) are forced to move in with her parents (Christopher Lloyd and Sondra James). It’s not the first time Dorothy has had to come back home. Long ago her husband (Max Martini), a n’er-do-well radio DJ known to his spellbound listeners simply as The Voice, abandoned her and JR. Dorothy’s latest setback comes after she’s fallen five months behind in her rent and faces the dire truth that she and JR have nowhere to go but the ramshackle Long Island home overseen by Lloyd’s disheveled, crotchety Grandpa.
Luckily for JR, his kindly Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) also lives there, and Charlie owns a nearby neighborhood bar, The Dickens. That’s the Tender Bar of the title, and for young JR it becomes the bedrock for his growing up. He loves the clamor of noisy relatives gathered around the dinner table at Grandpa’s – while at The Dickens he’s coddled by three of the heartiest regulars, all backslapping pals of Charlie’s. Chief (Max Casella), Joey D (Matthew Delamater) and Boho (Michael Braun) jovially help Charlie teach JR the tricks of working-class survival. Uncle Charlie focuses on “the masculine sciences”, three of which are: stash money in your wallet that you never use to buy drink, have a car, and never hit a woman. (This final axiom will stun JR later in his journey to manhood.)
Ranieri as young JR is a find. He already has a full-blown screen presence. He’s been gifted with one of the wellsprings of compelling movie acting: stay still and let the camera soak you up.
Charlie, the father figure JR longs for, stocks literary tomes behind The Dickens’ bar, including books by that other Dickens. He tells JR that if he reads voraciously, he could become a writer. Becoming a writer rather than doing much actual writing is mostly what the movie portrays, but that’s fair enough. You have to dream it to be it. Charlie’s closet also overflows with books, and a fascinated JR dives in.
Before long, the Voice, JR’s father, telephones out of the blue, takes JR for only a brief car ride, then mutters an abrupt goodbye, making it clear that he has no time for his son. This blind, unexplained rejection is the bitter pill that JR slowly learns to swallow.
The script interweaves flash forwards where the young adult JR (Tye Sheridan) enrolls at Yale. There he’s ensnared by an alluring, coldly self-assured mixed-race student, Sidney (Brianna Middleton). She invites him for Christmas to the Westport, Connecticut manse of her parents, both architects (JR calls them “lower-upper-middle class”). Before the young couple’s brief first idyll is over, Sidney informs JR that she’s “seeing someone else”. Undaunted, JR continues to yearn for Sidney in his dreams, the unattainable woman he may yet win.
The second half of the movie gets spikier as Sidney slowly puts her feelings for JR on ice, and finally marries someone else. There’s some consolation when JR lands a copyboy job at The New York Times, where he shows promise as a writer but still isn’t promoted to reporter. Maybe he can reconcile with the Voice? Maybe not. In a bleak visit to North Carolina, JR learns beyond doubt that his father is the callous brute he’s seemed to be all along. Somehow, the script suggests, this string of disappointments is slowly making JR a better, wiser writer.
Of course, there’s no such guarantee, and the movie cannily never asks us to believe in JR’s eventual literary success. Dreaming and striving provide the electricity that drives the early stages of a career, or a life.
The ’70s and ’80s hit songs on the soundtrack make for a beguiling counterpoint to the characters’ tattered dreams. And Martin Ruhe’s sunnily candid cinematography delicately highlights the actors’ faces.
(Ben Affleck as Uncle Charlie and Tye Sheridan as the older JR in The Tender Bar)
What kept me charmed by The Tender Bar, in addition to Ranieri, was Affleck’s gruff, unaffected performance as JR’s faithful Uncle Charlie. The manly sciences Charlie teaches JR don’t amount to much or provide the young man with any crucial guidance that we ever see. But they’re actually something much more durable – signposts of affection, a word we can’t imagine coming out of Charlie’s mouth.
The sometimes awkwardly worded, less than stylishly articulated advice JR is offered ends up pulling him through. Affleck’s loose, engaging work never calls on movie-star vanity, impressed as Charlie is with his street smarts. Clooney’s direction embraces all the characters’ modest dreams without fanfare, giving the movie an easygoing momentum and a pleasingly soft landing. Glory isn’t likely for these people. Sustained caring is, and often that’s enough to move forward.
Rabe is touching as JR’s perpetually disappointed mother, who believes JR’s Yale degree and his efforts to write will make all her years of sacrifice worthwhile. The scene where she shows off her new suit to the grown JR as she sets off for her first day of work selling insurance is a small gem. Passionate caring is mostly what Dorothy has been able to offer her son, yet the light in JR’s eyes as she bravely marches out the door hints that he couldn’t have survived without it.
The Tender Bar is one of those small pearls that all too rarely emerge shiny and bright from the pressures of the American movie industry. We know that Clooney of all people understands those pressures well, and here he’s kept Hollywood’s insistence on punchy, victorious movie endings out of his way. He lets the story’s glamourless people build themselves up from within. Striving counts. Accomplishments are iffy.
Especially in the scenes in The Dickens, a sustaining vitality fights through the drink, the noise, the unremarkable lives that nonetheless can support even the shakiest dreams. The Tender Bar actually is the kind of charming little picture they don’t often make any more, and, lamentably, we rarely go to them or watch them even if they do. This time, I wanted not just to catch the dreamers but hold onto them. Indeed, at the end, prompted by the mellow, thrumming Steely Dan lyrics sung under the closing credits, I wanted nothing so much as to go back, Jack, and do it again.