There were at least two reasons why George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar, an adaptation of J.R. Moehringer‘s autobiography, didn’t work as well it could or should have.
I’m speaking of Clooney’s virtue-signaling, inclusion-mandate casting calls.
Example #1 was casting young Daniel Ranieri as a 10 year-old version of Tye Sheridan. The resemblance factor was less than zero as Rainieri looked Southern Italian or Middle Eastern.
Example #2 was Clooney’s decision to change the identity of a wealthy Westport white girl named Sydney, whom Moehringer fell in love with during his time at Yale and who represents the unattainable ideal for a working-class kid from Manhasset…Clooney changed Sydney from a blonde, Daisy Buchanan-like character with a small nose, ample breasts and whiter-than-white parents, into a beautiful woman of color (Briana Middleton) and her parents into an interracial couple (mom is played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine).
This was presentism, of course — i.e., Clooney and producers Grant Heslov and Ted Hope trying to groove along with the ethos of progressive woke Hollywood.
And yet Clooney doesn’t appear to have cast his latest film, The Boys in the Boat, a mid 1930s sports saga based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 book of the same name, with the same eccentric pretensions.
As best as I can tell, Clooney has adhered to (gasp!) historical realism in casting this true-life saga about a University of Washington boat-rowing crew that represented the U.S. during the 1936 Summer Olympic games in Berlin.
By this I mean no actors of color were cast as crew members, and no LGBTQs were involved. Because the team and its trainers, working-class natives of Seattle, were (gasp!) regular-ass hetero white guys, and for whatever reason Clooney hasn’t tried to fudge this fact.
Pic costars Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Peter Guinness and Alec Newman.
The Wiki page says that Amazon MGM will open The Boys in the Boat on on Christmas day — Monday, 12.25. That can’t be right.
Where’s the teaser?