Movie Review: 'The Tender Bar' May Have the Most Acting if Not the Best

George Clooney is the kind of director that actors love. As an actor himself he understands the way actors think and what actors enjoy doing. It’s easy to imagine Clooney encouraging his actors to follow their muse no matter where it takes them. That has unfortunately led to some deeply indulgent performances in Clooney directed movies. From Sam Rockwell’s entertaining but kitsch heavy performance in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind to Matt Damon’s downright weird performance in Suburbicon, Clooney shows himself to be a director willing to indulge his actors to good and not so good extremes.

The latest actor allowed to indulge in extremes under the direction of George Clooney is Ben Affleck in the new Amazon Prime feature The Tender Bar. In this adaptation of JR Moehringer’s best selling memoir, Affleck plays Uncle Charlie to Tye Sheridan’s fictionalized version of the famed journalist and author. And boy can you tell this is directed by George Clooney. Affleck’s Charlie is a walking cliche of a New Yawk, Lawn Guy-land accent, all broad machismo and brainy posturing. As a fan of Affleck I can’t completely hate it, but even I have to recognize how a different director might have tried to reign in some of the broad aspects of Affleck’s otherwise scene stealing performance.

The Tender Bar tells the story of JR, a boy growing up in a Long Island neighborhood with a dream of becoming a writer one day. While JR dreams, his mom, Dorothy (Lilly Rabe) works incredibly hard to save money for JR’s future. To this end, after leaving JR’s deadbeat father, more on him later, Dorothy has moved her and her son into her father’s overcrowded Long Island home. To say Grandpa, played by Christopher Lloyd, is less than welcoming would be accurate. Also living at Grandpa’s is Uncle Charlie, Dorothy’s bar owning brother. Why Charlie lives with his dad is unclear, perhaps his bar isn’t as successful as it appears.

Uncle Charlie becomes a de-facto father figure to JR, always ready to offer advice and support in the form of his bartender style philosophizing. Uncle Charlie is one of these over-educated, under-employed types, a legend in his own mind who reads every book but doesn’t care for being smart, preferring to portray himself as a salt-of-the-Earth type. He’s a bar owner but he acts more like a bartender, preferring to crack wise with bar regulars rather than spend any time actually working.

But this isn’t about Uncle Charlie, this is supposed to be about JR and herein lies the fatal flaw at the heart of The Tender Bar. While our protagonist is JR, he’s the least interesting character and actor in the entire movie. That’s not to say that Tye Sheridan is a bad actor, he’s just poorly served by a script that gives all of the color and broad humor to the supporting characters while he struggles to hold the center of the story. While Affleck gets to indulge in his accent and stereotype, JR has to deliver a dull voiceover to fill in gaps in his story that the movie doesn’t have time for, perhaps too busy servicing the starry supporting cast.

The dramatic crux of JR’s story centers on his relationship, or lack of a relationship, with his father, whom he calls The Voice. JR’s dad is a radio disc jockey who he only really knows from listening to him on the radio. On the odd occasion he sees Papa Moehringer, played by Max Martini, it’s generally a disappointment. Anecdotes are dropped throughout The Tender Bar about the myriad times Dad disappointed his son either by promising and failing to show up or by not paying child support and dodging the cops by moving from state to state. These anecdotes are funny and poignant but they are mostly overshadowed by everything else in The Tender Bar.

As for the direction and look of The Tender Bar, George Clooney is a talented scenarist. The locations and the look of The Tender Bar are aged well and feel homey and inviting. The central bar in the movie, called Dickens, in honor of Charles Dickens, and lined with books on every wall, has a lovely warmth to it that contrasts with the dankness of a dive that likely hasn’t changed much in the time it has existed. It’s clear that the same people have been drinking at this same bar for many, many years and to Clooney’s credit, we don’t need any exposition to know that.

The Tender Bar has amiable qualities, it has a pleasant atmosphere, but it isn’t particularly memorable. That is, aside from Ben Affleck’s deeply indulgent performance. Even as I am a longtime Affleck fan and apologist, I can’t help but cringe at times at Affleck’s broad accent and stereotypical New Yorker stuff. Cringe is the best way to describe it. When Affleck as Uncle Charlie launches into a monologue about his rules for being a man, I couldn’t keep from recoiling at how he loses control over the accent and the performance charges past charming into a bad parody of a million other New York/Long Island characters.

Actors and even critics can oftentimes mistake the MOST acting with good acting. In my experience, the MOST acting and good acting tend to be at odds with each other. In the case of The Tender Bar, Ben Affleck is definitely doing the MOST acting but he’s far from doing the best acting. The performance is so broad that it passes from charming to cringe inducing, from modestly hammy to cringe inducingly obnoxious. Worst of all, Affleck’s performance overshadows the rest of the movie and combined with Tye Sheridan’s far too understated central performance, it throws off the balance of The Tender Bar.

The Tender Bar opened in limited theatrical release on December 17th and will expand nationwide on December 22nd before moving to Amazon Prime on January 7th.