As an actor, George Clooney has a lot of general onscreen charm that has helped put him on the Hollywood A-list even if many of his movies aren’t huge moneymakers. That’s OK. Not every actor needs to be in blockbusters. However, as a director, I often find his work wanting. The only one I thought was really good was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The Midnight Sky was resoundingly average at best, and the less said about the mess that was Suburbicon, the better. However, he has a new directorial effort, this one based on a memoir by writer J.R. Moehringer that has gotten, at least, some acclaim for actor Ben Affleck.
I wasn’t really psyched to see the movie in general, but I do like how Affleck has grown as an actor in more recent years, so I checked the movie out on Amazon Prime Video.
JR Maguire (no periods at first) is moving with his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) into his grandparents’ house. He’s a kid, here played by Daniel Ranieri, but as a college student he’ll be played by Tye Sheridan and he narrates the story as an adult voiced by Ron Livingston. It’s Long Island in the 70s, and Grandpa and Grandma (Christopher Lloyd and the late Sondra James) have a house that seems to have a never ending stream of aunts, uncles, and cousins coming through at all times. That is especially true for JR’s Uncle Charlie (Affleck) who owns a bar with a literary motif. JR doesn’t really know his father all that well. All he knows is the man is a radio personality referred to as “the Voice” (Max Martini), and he only comes by sporadically, during which Charlie will usually remind him that he owes Charlie $30. Dorothy dreams of sending JR to Yale or Harvard to become a lawyer, and while he does go to Yale, he takes to writing instead. And all the while, it is Uncle Charlie who acts as a father-figure, giving the lad lessons here and there on how to be a man.
Charlie may not be the most knowledgeable of men in many ways, but he sure does try his best, and his more homespun ideas (for lack of a better term) do amount to good, practical advice for JR, something he gradually comes to realize as he grows up. It’s not like he doesn’t listen to Uncle Charlie. It’s more like it takes him most of the movie to realize how much his father is not the right person to listen to, a task slowed down by how sporadically the Voice actually spends time with him.
So, basically, it’s a coming-of-age drama, one where JR will go off to school, have a first love, and eventually find the right path for himself. Quite frankly, there’s not much special here. If anything, the pacing and the tone are a bit odd. Moments of broad comedy don’t exactly dominate the film, and the trailer makes it out to be a bit more of a comedy than it actually is. There’s the standard period music on the soundtrack, but then there will be odd scenes like Lloyd’s Grandpa dropping some heavy news onto his grandson at what seems like a weird time given the context of the scene or just an odd dream sequence where child JR and twentysomething JR have an argument, a moment that comes more or less out of nowhere since it’s the only moment in the movie at all like it.
But the critical consensus was right about Affleck. He comes across as a man who’s trying his best, knows a few things but isn’t all that preachy, and maybe hasn’t gotten too far in life but likewise seems more or less fine where he is. He’s a man who has lived life and has some pointers to share while doing what he can to show a boy a good time in light of an otherwise horrible childhood situation where one parent is generally absent and the other, though a good mother, has her own problems that keep her from being around as much as she may want to be. JR could do far worse than Uncle Charlie for a role model, and it would be hard to see how he could have done better. In a movie filled with average performances, Affleck does stand out since he does turn in a good one. Too bad the rest of the movie is rather forgettable. So, less Confessions of a Dangerous Mind or Suburbicon and more The Midnight Sky. I suspect I won’t remember too much about this one in six months.
Grade: C
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