104 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A fatherless boy grows up in a Long Island bar full of men who decide to raise him. His uncle hands him a reading list and a code to live by. The bar pours warmth. The movie sips it.
JR Maguire grows up in his grandfather’s crowded Long Island house with a mother who wants him at Yale and a father who exists only as a voice on the radio. The man who fills the gap is his Uncle Charlie, a bartender who runs a saloon called the Dickens and stocks the back room with books. George Clooney frames this as a memory of how a boy assembles a father out of the men around him. The real subject is the gap that the father leaves and the substitutes that grow in to cover it. The film treats that gap with affection and keeps it at a careful distance.
Ben Affleck plays Charlie as a man who dispenses wisdom without ever sounding like he is dispensing it. He tells JR the rules of being a man and makes each one land like a passing remark rather than a lesson. Affleck gives the role weight by underplaying it. Daniel Ranieri plays the young JR with a watchful quality that suits a kid cataloging the adults around him. Tye Sheridan inherits the older JR and carries less heat than the early scenes promise. Lily Rabe plays Dorothy as a woman exhausted by her own ambitions for her son, and Christopher Lloyd grounds the house as the gruff grandfather.
Clooney directs from a script by William Monahan that leans on JR’s adult narration to carry the years. The voiceover does the work the scenes should do. It tells the audience what JR feels instead of building images that make him feel it. The production design renders the Dickens and the Yale dorms with a soft period glow that flattens the decades into one warm haze. Monahan strings the memoir into episodes that arrive and resolve without accumulating force.
The film is pleasant company and never more than that. Every conflict softens before it can cut. JR’s father returns and disappears without the wound the setup demands, and the romance at Yale plays as a detour rather than a reckoning. Clooney has the cast and the material to make something that aches. He settles for something that merely glows.