The Tender Bar (2021)

 Tye Sheridan is having a fine year in a very successful career. He is also in Paul Schrader’s very fine drama about the trauma of war;The Card Counter.

In this one he is the main character in a young man’s coming of age story set roughly in the last 30 years of the 20th Century. The 70s and 80s in the movie feel remote, long ago. Was it really that long ago? Part of that could be the Long Island setting. Perhaps there, in comparison to NYC, the suburban lifestyle is very concerned with a type of traditional notions about what a man is and what a woman is and what they can expect from one another. Part of this view of life is that all a young man needs to get through it all is to have another older male mentor to tell him what is what. In this JR is fortunate that he has a middle-aged uncle interested in his well being after JR and his abandoned mother, dad being mostly his DJ voice on the radio, moves into the crowded Manhasset home of the patriarch grandfather and extended family. 
Fortunately the uncle is more than a suburban bar owner and bartender. His mentoring is spot on for the lucky boy. The guy is a bookish autodidact with a closet (!) full of books, “Wanna be a writer? Read all these!”  
He eventually meets daddy with very disappointing results.
Will grow and blossom in spite of his alcohol saturated roots.
George Clooney directed this adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s memoir.
See it on Amazon Prime.

The Card Counter

 The Card Counter (2021)

Written and directed by Paul Schrader

  This movie channels collective guilt and rage at what we have been made to do. How, in our name, our pain, shock, and grief was twisted and exploited by people in power to make us monsters worse by far than the act that hurt us, that caused us this pain and horror
. 

  Will Tell (Oscar Isaac) the character in the movie, has been made into a monster, a sadistic automaton, manipulated into performing horrifying acts against other humans. He is going to have to pay for this, for what he was made to do by people in the highest positions of power. He has to pay, to take the fall, for what they made him do, as his “superiors'” retain their lofty, lucuratice, respected, and honored positions. 

He tries to just go on with his life after. He likes to play cards and is good at it. He has clamped down the justifiable feelings of vengeance and guilt he has to carry with him always. He can never forget, but plays cards.
 

  He meets another damaged, traumatized man (Tye Sheridan) and this sets the story in motion.

  Yes we were told to never forget after the collective trauma. Then asked to support people in power who used our trauma for further a separate and horrifying agenda. We put millions of others, those who managed to survive, through trauma, to a position where they can never forget which will cycle into more violence, horror, trauma, and more never forgetting that has not yet ended and likely never will. 

  The Card Counter is a very disturbing, deeply moving artwork that channels our collective guilt, rage, vengefulness, and yearning for justice, reconciliation, or to somehow get it all to STOP. 

An important movie and a masterpiece from a broken heart. A message from that broken heart to ours, if we still have one.

Old Boyfriends (1978)

 Old Boyfriends (1978)

Directed by Joan Tewkesbury
Written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Dianne is an LA psychologist going through a difficult time. She is retracing her past, driving around the country in her car. She is hunting down old boyfriends, relationships that didn’t work out from years back, even back to junior high school.

The movie has a very good cast of men supporting the nuanced central performance by Talia Shire as Dianne.

What is Dianne after? Is it revenge? It seems to be in the first two reconnecting encounters. First in Colorado with Jeff, Richard Jordan, who she seduces and immediately abandons without a trace. Then in Chicago with Eric, John Belushi, her high school boyfriend. She takes Eric to the old teen parking makeout place where they were as kids and restages a scene that hurt her. This time, in control, it comes out differently.

Things begin to shift for her when she meets up with Wayne played by Keith Carradine. She goes back to the town where she lived in her early years and goes to the home of her old junior high boyfriend there. Here she meets Wayne, the younger brother of the old boyfriend who was killed some years ago in Vietnam. Wayne has been wounded by the loss of his brother who he idolized and looked up to.

Their interaction brings about a shift in Dianne and the path to the resolution of this small but appealingly personal dramatic movie.

There was a scene looking out the window in the neighborhood where she meets Wayne. Something about that shot evoked another small movie set somewhere in the USA in John Huston’s Wise Blood.
There is a tone in movies like this, to quote the great lyrics to The House I Live in by Abel Meeropol, “That’s America to me.”