When does a writer become a writer? When he publishes his first book? When he writes his first newspaper column or magazine article? Or is all it takes for a writer to become a writer is simply to say that he is a writer? For J.R. Moehringer, the author of the memoir The Tender Bar, it is decidedly the latter.
Everyone knows, of course, that it takes much more than merely saying you are a writer to become one. But the status of “writer” is far less easily definable, with far fewer strict borders and obvious parameters than the identity of, say, a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or business owner. There is no equivalent of a bar exam that one must pass in order to become a writer, no graduation ceremony where one receives a diploma that confers upon the person the status of “writer.” Because of its more expansive boundaries and its subjective, nebulous nature, the process of becoming a writer itself became one of the great subjects for writers in the 20th century. Once literature took a more interior turn, a whole new world of possibilities opened themselves up to writers: namely, that of writing about their own journeys of becoming writers. From James Joyce to Philip Roth, the story of How Sensitive Intelligent Young Person Became a Writer, otherwise known as the kunstlerroman, became one of the essential genres of the modern novel.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Moehringer chose to work in this genre for his first book — a memoir, not a novel, as the self-writing trend in our era has moved from fiction to nonfiction (autofiction notwithstanding). What is surprising, though, is that his book now has been made into a movie, and one directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, no less. That’s a lot of glamour from a book (and a writer) with decidedly nonglamorous origins. Films about writers and writing are notoriously hard to make interesting, given the typically boring lives and monastic work habits of writers whose names aren’t Ernest. Fortunately, this is a movie not about Moehringer’s life as a writer but about how he became a writer, meaning that we get to see the story of his life before it became dull.
Moehringer’s life may have never been as exciting as Hemingway’s, but it was certainly not uninteresting. Young JR (Daniel Ranieri), deliberately spelled with no periods, as we later find out, lives with his unstable mother (Lily Rabe), who has to move in with her father after she falls behind on her rent. Young JR’s father is a radio disc jockey whose voice he hears on the radio but whose presence is mostly missing from his life. The move to his grandfather’s house is pivotal for JR. Living in a house filled with people — cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents — gives him an outlet for his extroversion as well as a diversion from his mother’s anxieties and insecurities. Even more crucially, it gives him the father figure he has been sorely lacking in his life somewhat in the figure of his usually taciturn, occasionally amiable Grandpa (Christopher Lloyd — yes, that Christopher Lloyd, from Back to the Future, who looked like he was in his 80s during the 1980s but is now somehow only in his 80s), but much more so in the figure of his Uncle Charlie (Affleck).
Uncle Charlie plays the kind of role for JR that Paulie and the other mafia dons play for Henry Hill in Goodfellas, providing him with masculine presences in his life that help him understand who he is and what he might be able to become. The Tender Bar is not a mafia movie, and Uncle Charlie does not initiate JR into a life of organized crime. But the Long Island accents, the ‘70s clothes and cars, and the voice-over narration may be evocative of Goodfellas for you, as it was for me. Especially evocative of Martin Scorsese’s classic is Clooney’s casting of Max Casella, an actor who appears to have graduated summa cum laude from the Joe Pesci school of acting and line delivery.
Uncle Charlie is not a graduate of any college save for the school of life. A rugged, dispassionate Cool Hand Luke-type who runs a bar and plays pickup baseball, Uncle Charlie possesses a time-tested treasure store of wisdom he’s eager to impart to his nephew, for whom he cares about deeply in his unobtrusive way and upon whom he lavishes his brand of stoical masculine affection. He instructs his young pupil in the importance of mastering “the male sciences,” most of which involve proper automobile maintenance. When JR gets older, these male sciences will encompass females. When JR is in college, he falls in love with Sidney (Briana Middleton), a girl from a rich family who takes him to her parents’ home in Westport, Connecticut, for Christmas only to break up with him after their first night together at her home. The breakfast JR has with her and her parents provides us with some of the film’s funniest lines, if at the price of years of heartache for JR. They also provide Uncle Charlie with an opportunity to give JR what amounts to a How Not To Get Your Girlfriend Back speech as JR wallows in a yearslong unproductive fixation on one girl (what in some corners today is called “oneitis”).
Uncle Charlie’s most important influence on JR, though, is in helping to identify and cultivate JR’s talent for writing. The autodidactic Uncle Charlie may not have a Ph.D. or even a B.A., but he is as well read as nearly any humanities graduate student. A literature lover who has named his bar after Charles Dickens, he knows good writing when he sees it, and he believes that JR has “it.” Ever the well-intentioned realist, Uncle Charlie wisely steers JR away from sports, which he is not very good at, and toward reading and literature. He shows young JR his closet full of books and tells him to read everything in the closet. Without Uncle Charlie in his life to make him into a reader, the movie strongly implies, we may never have had JR Moehringer the writer.
A significant subplot of The Tender Bar concerns JR’s search for his father, which the movie, by referencing Homer in a key scene in one of JR’s first college classes, appears to be attempting to map on to The Odyssey, so that we view JR’s search for his father as a modern-day version of Telemachus’s search for Odysseus. Although it supplies the film with some of its more dramatic scenes, this subplot is ultimately a sideshow from the movie’s more important story: the heartfelt bond between an uncle and his nephew. And though the focus of the film is on old JR (Tye Sheridan), the heart of the movie is the stolid, Aquinas-parsing Uncle Charlie, rooting fervently for his nephew to escape the doldrums of their lives in Manhasset and make something of himself in the way he knows he can, just as Affleck’s character Chuckie in Good Will Hunting rooted desperately for his brilliant friend to escape his life as a manual laborer in South Boston. If we substitute “nephew” for “best friend” and “Mets” for “Patriots,” we can easily imagine Uncle Charlie giving the same speech to old JR as Chuckie gave to Will: “Look, you’re my best friend, so don’t take this the wrong way, but in 20 years, if you’re still livin’ here, comin’ over to my house, watchin’ the Patriots game, workin’ construction, I’ll f***in’ kill ya.”
Affleck’s understated performance as Uncle Charlie has deservedly netted him a Golden Globe best supporting actor nomination. With his more farcical, roguish turn as Pierre d’Alencon in The Last Duel getting Oscar buzz as a best supporting actor dark horse contender, it’s quite possible that Affleck’s best competition for his first acting Oscar this year could be himself.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg.
