Wow! What a great film. Set in the early ‘70s, and chronicling the childhood of a fatherless boy*, who finds solace and inspiration under the wing of his bar owner uncle.
I love the early ‘70s aesthetics of this film, and just the whole visual vibe of small town America of that era, at least as portrayed here. The particularly American style of individual suburban wooden homes, all slightly different, really appeals. The era is also cherry-picked somewhat for great music, funky duds, nice wheels, and those really quite beautiful American homes.
And this is no stupid action adventure sci-fi superhero bollocks either, just plain ol’ humdrum ‘real life’. Based on a memoir of the same name, it’s not so humdrum, truth be told, as JR gets into Yale – his mother’s dream – and his family and friends, despite a mostly absent father, are quite a colourful bunch.
There’s a lot of heart and humanity in this film. And many moments I loved, such as when uncle Charley opens his cupboard to reveal a sizeable stash of books. This is his auto-didact’s library, and he exhorts the young JR to read them all! That, to me, is kind of heart/brain porn, if you know what I mean.
Right now I can’t be doing with any more of a synopsis, or unravelling it all. I just really dig it. The acting is great; very engaging. The production is fantastic, Clooney does his job really well.
Daniel Ranieri and Tye Sheridan as JR the child and JR the young man are terrific, as is Ben Affleck, as the kindly self-educated uncle Charley. Indeed, the whole cast acquit themselves admirably. A real heartwarming feel good movie. Thanks, GC!
*Absent rather than nonexistent!
Part the second, or a few further thoughts.
Ok, so I said I wouldn’t try and unravel this. But I guess Ah cain’t he’p maself’!
So, one or two further thoughts… The first is that this is, despite several female characters, the strongest of whom – both as a person and in terms of the film’s focus – is JR’s mom, a film about a boy becoming a man. Or put another way, boyhood and manhood/masculinity/maleness, or whatever one might call it.
It’s also mostly about how a boy relates to his elders – there’s a great if very brief scene that underscores that, early in the film (when JR passes a room full of dancing kids, only to watch uncle Charley at rest, before wandering off alone) – only really becoming more focussed on his peers once he gets to Yale. And even then they are now ‘young men’, and mostly looking forward, not backwards.
As much as it’s main focus is on the male condition, there is more than just a nod to the ladies’ experiences. But whilst it’s all quite sensitively handled, there is, like Charley’s homespun code of manhood, imparted to JR at the bar, a rather old-fashioned vision of male/female relations at the core of the story. And, like the fags and booze, in today’s times this can look almost as ‘quaint’ as the seventies visual aesthetics.
But for ageing men like Clooney, and me, all of this can be somewhat more deeply bittersweet that the surface appearances might convey. And this aspect of the film is amplified by JR’s affairs with Sidney. Unlike the unrequited loves of my youth, whose potent effects on my development have, for better or worse, shaped my entire life, JR’s advances are requited, albeit not quite to his satisfaction.
This thread of the plot prevents the whole thing from becoming too cloyingly ‘feel good’, as JR has to contend with not only an absent father, but thwarted young love.
One final observation on the more critical ‘unweaving the rainbow’ side would be this: when the ornery Grandpa Maguire (played terrifically by Christopher ’Doc’ Lloyd) scrubs up and takes JR to the ‘father’s breakfast’ at school, there’s a scene where he charms JR’s teacher by revealing his own well developed (if otherwise rarely deployed) critical intellect.
It’s my own experience and observation that such a scenario – whilst within the realms of possibility – reeks of a certain self-indulgent fantasy. In all probability the person on the receiving end of such ‘insights’ (whether these are right or wrong or chime with my own perceptions/beliefs, etc) has to work hard to conceal – poorly, usually – their disinterest. Such poils of wisdom more normally elicit responses ranging from boredom to hostility.
Gramps has worn out his welcome on such things back at his home. But JR’s teacher is, it appears, smitten. He has scrubbed up well, and he can be quite charming. But the old fart back home side of his portrayal looks, to me, and rather sadly, the more realistic face of such a character.
So, in the end I couldn’t resist a bit of analysis. And I didn’t even really touch on the whole bit about Yale and JR’s buddies there, or the barflies at Dicken’s, or the NY Times journo’ bits. There’s plenty of narrative meat, albeit somehow both rich and lean, to this ‘flick’.
For me, in these days of sci-fi and superheroes, and crime capers and rom-com chick-flicks, this is a rare and welcome kind of film, that speaks very directly to me. I mean, the music, for example; almost (but not quite!) every track used throughout the film is stuff I love. And ending with Steely Dan’s ‘Do It Again’? Ah, sheer bliss…