We thought George Clooney would be the Messiah of Hollywood.

So we thought

"The Tender Bar," George Clooney's film that aired on Amazon over the weekend, is like the hole in the pretzel: an airy and pointless film that finally illustrates how disappointing the directing career of someone who started as a big promise

Avner Shavit

10/01/2022

Monday, 10 January 2022, 00:08

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Trailer for the movie "The Tender Bar" (Amazon Prime)

Star rating for movies - 1.5 stars (Photo: Image Processing,.)

George Clooney's directing career began as a great promise. We marked him as the next Robert Redford - a successful and handsome actor who became a director, and made acclaimed films with a liberal consciousness. Clooney reached its peak in the mid-2000s with "Good Night and Good Luck," a drama about the struggle against McCarthyism that won numerous Oscar nominations, including in the directing categories. Was it because of her liberal positions, the name of the director behind her or the objective quality of the work? All the answers may be correct.

Either way, from then on, the promising creator's directing career has deteriorated, and he's likely to continue to get opportunities just because he's George Clooney. His low point, for me, was in the middle of the previous decade, with "Treasure Hunters," which took a fascinating story and some of the best actors in the world, and managed to concoct from them the most trivial film imaginable. Then came "The Suburbs Story," which turned a covert script by the Cohen brothers into an embarrassing farce, a forgotten television adaptation of "Catch 22" and an even more forgotten film for Netflix called "Midnight Sky."

Admittedly, this is an easy goal. It is always convenient and tempting to whip the rich and famous, and if they are straight and white men it is even more populist. Sometimes the easy goals are also fair goals, and so it is in this case. At least as a filmmaker, Clooney specializes in making empty, airy films like the hole inside the pretzel.

If Clooney had been where we thought he would be today, every new product of his would have been a cause for celebration.

In fact, his new film went up on Amazon Prime around the world and in the country last weekend, and did so in complete silence, despite the director's identity and even though it stars Ben Affleck and also Ty Sheridan, some of the best young actors in Hollywood.

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Mild goals are sometimes fair goals.

From "The Tender Bar" (Photo: Amazon Prime)

The film is called "The Tender Bar" and is based on J.R. Moringer's biographical book. Similar to the original, the film adaptation also depicts the childhood and adolescence of the writer in New England in the 1970s. He barely sees his alcoholic father, and instead finds refuge with his uncle, played by Ben Affleck, who works as a bartender in a pub after which the book and film are named.

Sheridan plays the protagonist in his youth, and the film depicts how despite his dysfunctional family of low economic status, he manages to get accepted to a prestigious university, join a company of rich boys and girls, specialize in the New York Times and pursue a journalistic and literary career.

In Clooney's previous projects, he had interesting raw materials and he did not exhaust them.

This time, it will be said to his credit that the story is from heaven in the first place.

Moringer is a respected journalist and writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, who is also set to write a book with Prince Harry soon.

But with all due respect, he's not Hemingway.

There are at least two hundred more writers and journalists in his class, so why should we care about his professional growth?

To my understanding, the literary source places more emphasis on drinking, alcoholism and the pub where the protagonist spent time.

American pubs are a place full of character and emotion, so maybe there was potential interest here, but despite the film's name, Clooney makes the bar a marginal anecdote in the plot.

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The first 45 minutes of this movie are perfect.

The problem is what happens next

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The actors are good, the film is not.

From "The Tender Bar" (Photo: Amazon Prime)

Instead, the film focuses on the young man's relationship with a girl named Sydney, whose father is white and whose mother is black. The balance of power between them is perhaps the only aspect here that has some kind of sting in it. Unlike driving in Hollywood, this time the girl is above the man, both physically in bed in the sex scene between them, and in every other sense. She is richer than him, she maneuvers him and plays with his feelings, and she decides when they will lie down and when not and when they will be together and when not. However, by itself, her character is undeveloped and unreliable, and the shared scenes of the two characters are forced.

To the credit of Clooney it will also be said that in reality and behind the camera, he is a guy with a sense of humor. "The Tender Bar" is neither heavy nor heavy, and has some graceful dialogues. The result is light and quick, but that's part of the problem. There are movies at the end of which we do not understand why we watched them. At the end of this movie, we do not understand at all what we watched, and of course do not remember anything. This comedic drama leaves no impression.

The cast also includes old and good names like Lily Rave and Christopher Lloyd, and Sydney is played by groundbreaking star Brianna Middleton, who will soon be seen in a Disney Plus mini-series based on "Beauty and the Beast."

When you're George Clooney, it's not really hard for you to recruit actors and actresses.

In addition, the film also enjoys the style of the seventies and the work of the photographer Martin Rowe, who was responsible at the time for the exemplary photography of "Control".

But the feeling is that behind all this was not a director, but an algorithm.

There is no rhythm, clear tone or any climactic moments here.

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The director is huge, the playwright is legendary, the actors are huge - and the film is just boring

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Another disappointment.

From "The Tender Bar" (Photo: Amazon Prime)

Despite the jealousy of Clooney and the pleasure of clashing with him, these things are written with sorrow.

At the height of the Corona, when new movies are barely hitting theaters, it was nice to find something to recommend on streaming.

Hollywood needed caring, charismatic and dominant characters like Clooney, if only he had fulfilled even a little of the promise that lay within him.

Again, it's not wise to bump into him, but it's also the truth: he's handsome, white - and a crappy director.

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