PAGE A15, KEIZERTIMES, FEBRUARY 04, 2022
Clooney’s Tender Bar adequate at best
BY T.J REID
For the Keizertimes
I like to think that I have lived a
fairly interesting life so far, but I am
under no illusions that anyone would
ever care to read a book or watch a
movie about it. It’s a good life and it’s
my own, but it just doesn’t have a narra-
tive that would compel or interest any-
one with the possible exception of my
closest friends and family.
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Biographies need to have a little
something special to them if they
are going to entertain, and it cer-
tainly doesn’t hurt if the subject is a
larger-than-life fi gure that everyone
knows. The Tender Bar is a fairly well
made (if not mind-blowing) fi lm about
the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning jour-
nalist J.R. Moehringer that is mildly
interesting in the fi rst half, a slog in the
second, and ultimately has very little of
interest to say.
Directed by George Clooney, The
Tender Bar (a pretentious and awk-
ward name that I absolutely despise)
is, in a word, adequate. The cinematog-
raphy is fi ne (with the exception of a
goofy-looking zoom-in here or there),
the acting is fi ne (Ben Affl eck as Uncle
Charlie is the clear standout), and the
script is, you guessed it, fi ne.
The fi rst third of the fi lm that focuses
on a younger Moehringer (played by
Daniel Ranieri) with occasional jumps
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kept going and going. I was stunned
when I learned that the entire fi lm
clocked in at only 104 minutes, as it felt
like at least 180.
Could this have been improved
by tighter editing and more succinct
scriptwriting? Perhaps. But honestly I
think the true culprit was the fact that
Moehringer’s story isn’t that unique.
Countless protagonists in literature
have daddy issues. Everyone doubts
themselves and everyone gets rejected
by people they love and jobs they want.
And instead of giving the audi-
ence the “oh, this guy is just like me,
how relatable,” feeling The Tender
Bar instead comes off as someone tell-
ing a story that they think is fascinat-
ing and unique when it just isn’t. When
it comes to being a piece of entertain-
ment, The Tender Bar doesn’t really
justify its existence, I am sad to say.
The Tender Bar (ugh… that name…)
is now available on Amazon Prime.
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to Tye Sheridan’s version of the char-
acter a few years later is interesting
enough with its themes of fatherhood
and family, giving the proceedings a
nostalgic feel despite the common-
place tropes of the story.
But when the narrative moves
completely over to Sheridan the pac-
ing slows to a nasty crawl that is not
alleviated by anything we as an audi-
ence have not seen thousands of
times before. Sheridan’s version of
Moehringer goes to college, meets a
girl, falls in love, experiences heart-
break, doubt, all that fun stuff . He gets
a job but doesn’t get the job he wanted,
fi nally confronts his father, blah blah
blah. Not helping matters is the fact
that Affl eck, the best part of the fi lm,
is mostly thrust into the background at
this point and that Sheridan shows the
emotional range of a particularly stoic
cardboard box.
And somehow, The Tender Bar just
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