When Rob Reiner was killed earlier this week along with his wife and creative partner Michelle, the world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures, an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor. All the while, Reiner maintained a spotless reputation as a mensch in an industry with vanishingly few of those. He was one of the most sophisticated and successful political activists in California, and his work (and money) helped pass the state's groundbreaking marriage equality law. Few filmmakers have had as vast or varied an impact on American life over the last 50 years, which is something that Reiner would surely have found very funny. Here are some of Reiner's films and roles that we love:
Stand By Me
Stand By Me is probably the purest chunk of schmaltz in Rob Reiner's generational early-career run. The movie is oozing with sentiment, factory-designed to squeeze profundity out of every otherwise mundane childhood interaction, and some not so mundane. It pulls out every trouble-at-home cliché to make you root for the kids and add dramatic heft. Richard Dreyfuss's narration should come with an insulin pump.
And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.
Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.
It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius.
- Barry Petchesky
Misery
When I think about Rob Reiner's movies the first word that comes to mind is "warmth." These are comfort movies, the kind I was always happy to fall into while splayed on the couch on a sleepy Saturday afternoon, and Reiner's visual aesthetic makes them perfectly suited to that role. Whenever I watch A Few Good Men I can't help but spend a little time fantasizing about how nice it would be to hang out in Daniel Kaffee's apartment, watch a ballgame and eat some Chinese food with him, and then take a stroll down his tree-lined street in the autumn evening.
What makes Misery one of my all-time favorite films is how easily Reiner is able to reproduce all of that comforting visual language and repurpose it for the sake of filling my chest with overwhelming terror. Misery is full of sunshine and pristine snowdrifts and cozy interiors. When Paul Sheldon wakes up in Annie Wilkes's spare bedroom after his car accident, it's hard to imagine a better place for him to have ended up. The window is big and the sun is bright and you can practically smell the butterscotch and scented candles.
When the terror arrives, it's not because Paul has been yanked from that place of comfort and into one of torment, but because Wilkes invades it with her madness. This makes Misery the rare horror movie that doesn't have to rely on environmental threats or the fear of an unknown space to hit its marks. Paul remains in that room, swaddled in pajamas and kissed by the sunlight coming through the window, even as Wilkes places a beam between his ankles and lines up her sledgehammer to take a swing. This is what a horror movie is supposed to do: show you something so unnatural, so wrong to look at, that the image will never leave you.
- Tom Ley
When Harry Met Sally
It’s like 90 minutes and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.
That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.
- Maitreyi Anantharaman
Michael "Meathead" Stivic in All In The Family
Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.
The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible-but-weirdly-prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one; I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.
Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMdB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him.
- Ray Ratto
This Is Spinal Tap
In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: the best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.
On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.
Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”
Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the set-up: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “these go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.
Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)
That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity; who produces not just a masterpiece but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most re-watchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich.”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.
- Luis Paez-Pumar
A Few Good Men
A Few Good Men is an imperfect film. The music kicks in within the first minute, and that is when you know, absolutely, that the movie was made in the 1990s. That loud synthesizer-ass theme could not have come from any time before or since. The storytelling is dopey and earnest in ways that are heavily Aaron Sorkin–coded, a trait that was less identifiable back when A Few Good Men was released but has become somewhat tragic in the decades since. Also, it strikes me when I watch it now that Kiefer Sutherland absolutely did not need to attempt a southern accent.
That is another artifact of the era, I suppose. A Few Good Men was released in 1992, the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Francis Ford Coppola himself decided that the gesture toward a British accent was important enough to his movie to outweigh Keanu Reeves's total inability to affect one. It was not a great decade for subtle pop filmmaking. Plenty of great pop films were made during that period, those two very much included, but they were very clearly made During That Period.
With the exception of the music, which is noisy but minimized, I have come to love and to cherish the goofiness of A Few Good Men. It has a kind of hokey faith in itself that suits the material. The movie seems to express no aspirations grander than what it achieves; to its credit, it also never seems to want to disavow its themes, or the people it presents, for their general unsexiness. The film takes these people and their issues seriously enough, but only seriously enough, and then proceeds without seeming to demand that you feel any particular way about what is being presented. It knows its limitations.
Rob Reiner, who worked with Sorkin to adapt Sorkin's stage play for the screen, seems uninterested in convincing viewers onto either side of the ideological line dividing JoAnne Galloway and Sam Weinberg on the question of how to feel about Marine Corps zealotry. I suspect this was because those making the film recognized that the story and dialogue could sustain the lightest of touches, and that the audience could handle more than the usual helping of respect. They were right: A Few Good Men manages to command total attention despite offering a combined 45 seconds or so of anything that could be described as action, and despite an absolute refusal of obvious art or flair that borders on squaredom. You could forget altogether that Reiner directed it—or for that matter that anyone directed it—and in fact I think I had watched it three or four times already in my life before that moment in the opening credits finally clicked into place, and I went, wait, Rob Reiner?
Someone recently pointed out to me that Weinberg, played by Kevin Pollack, is an awful lot like Rob Reiner himself, in particular in all the scenes when Pollack is freed to be funny. That's as close as Reiner came to leaving a fingerprint on the movie: He cast a then-less-than-famous impressionist in an unassuming supporting role, and then the two of them settled on Rob Reiner as a model for the character's understated sense of humor. It works out to be fair payment for an otherwise commendably restrained directing job. There are just those plain sets, generous lighting, a marginalized score, evident faith in the audience, and a half-dozen or more of the greatest lines in movie history. In many of Reiner's movies, his personal charm and humor buoy the material, but I appreciate about this one that he wasn't too committed to making his presence felt to let the material speak for itself. And I will be torturing my family with the words of Nathan Jessup and Daniel Kaffee until they put me in the ground.
- Chris Thompson
"Jay" In Sleepless In Seattle
When I was 12, my mom sat me down and said, "We're watching Sleepless in Seattle." It was my first Nora Ephron film, and I felt like she was initiating me into the rarified world of Movies for Women. More than 20 years later, watching it still feels like crawling into my mom's bed.
The versions of the actors in the film—Meg Ryan with her long, curly hair, Tom Hanks with only a barely receding hairline, Rosie O'Donnell still a decade away from coming out—settled into my memory with a permanency usually reserved for family members. Rob Reiner's supporting role as Tom Hanks's funny friend Jay cemented him as an avuncular figure in my mind. This was Uncle Rob, with the open face and easy laugh, who confirms that Hanks has a "cute" butt and warns him about modern women and their love of tiramisu.
As I learned more about Ephron's career, I came to appreciate Reiner's role in what I consider to be her masterpiece trifecta of When Harry Met Sally, which Reiner directed from a screenplay they wrote together, and Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, which she directed. After cycling through several screenwriters and directors, the producers hired Ephron on the merit of her work on When Harry Met Sally, which she wrote with Reiner; when she took over Sleepless, she brought Reiner with her. I have to imagine that he was a warm presence in what sounds like a nightmare of a production situation; he certainly delivers that effect in his every onscreen moment.
Despite Sleepless's having been a logistical mess covered with other people's fingerprints, it came out lovely. Most importantly, it was successful enough for Ephron to make another film. She thought of You've Got Mail as the spiritual successor to Sleepless, the film it could have been had she been in charge from the beginning. Would Ephron have made the jump to romantic comedies without Reiner's partnership? Thankfully, we don't have to find out.
- Alex Sujong Laughlin
"'Mad' Max Belfort" In The Wolf Of Wall Street
There is not a single voice of reason in The Wolf Of Wall Street, which is one of the more literal ways in which Martin Scorsese's 2013 film is Based On A True Story. It is one of Scorsese's movies about American-style avarice turning opportunistic young people into absolute monsters, with some significant help from those opportunistic young people's utterly untrammeled male appetites; like Scorsese's other films of this type, it is so vivid and visceral and alive from one moment to the next that some percentage of the audience overlooks the "turning into absolute monsters" aspect of it all. Scorsese has his ways of highlighting this—think of the silent characters near the center of these scenes but not quite at them, witnessing everything these monsters do—although there's only so much he can do about how people watch or understand the thing he's made once it's out of his hands.
The most notable thing about Reiner's character in The Wolf Of Wall Street, an authentically great performance in which he does a great deal of work in comparatively few scenes, is that he is not silent. In a film in which every character is overstated or just overmedicated, Reiner's character is nicknamed Mad Max because he is "always screaming." He is the father of the film's shameless and increasingly overextended protagonist, and he is screaming, almost always, in the way that certain types of Long Island guys are always screaming, but he is also just outside his son's speedy orbit of shithead scammers. Reiner is very funny, of course, in the ways that he always was as an actor; he bounces loudly off his scene partners and the walls as needed, and delivers that peculiar sort of later-Scorsese poignancy in playing a man who knows that he is being selfish and doing wrong—"this is obscene," he tells his degenerate son at one point, in a line reading that instantly grounds and chills an otherwise comic scene—but can't quite bring himself to do anything about it.
To hear him talk about it, Reiner was just happy to be there. "Anytime you can be in a Martin Scorsese movie," Reiner said back in 2013, "and you're allowed to have curse words, you do it." Most of what Reiner does in this part is what he did throughout his admirably active semi-retirement as an actor, when he popped up as a big, voluble presence on TV shows that he thought were funny and would let him improvise; that run is pretty much whiff-free, although this part was probably the biggest swing he took after bailing on acting to direct in the 1980s. It's not a quiet performance, but it is a surprisingly subtle one around the edges, and sad in some sneaky and moving ways. Reiner manages the trick of making his character and his character's scenes feel significant, even though both are largely ancillary to the bigger story being told. It's the sort of thing that great actors do with small parts, a little bit of modest mastery from an artist who was happy to work at the edge of the spotlight.
- David Roth
The Princess Bride
A director is lucky if they make one perfect film in their career. Rob Reiner made three, all within five years of one another: This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally. I don’t think of those works primarily as Rob Reiner films, which is more a compliment to Reiner than an insult. Rob Reiner’s master skill as a filmmaker was in his adaptability. For Tap, Reiner let the improvisational genius of his cast do the heavy lifting. For When Harry Met Sally, Reiner got out of the way of Nora Ephron’s perfect script and let his two leads—Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan—animate it in ways that no directorial flourish could.
And then we get to Princess Bride, which is somehow the most perfect of those three. Perhaps thanks to his television work, the young director Reiner already knew how to match the picture to the tone of William Goldman’s legendary script; the story went from fairy tale, to screwball comedy, to swashbuckling adventure, to note-perfect love story. For the comedic elements of Bride, Reiner could get a razor sharp one-liner out of Wallace Shawn’s Vizzini. For its more storybook parts, he could shoot a dreamy sequence with Robin Wright’s Buttercup gently falling into the arms of Andre the Giant’s Fezzik. For the rousing adventure parts, he could stage a duel that remains one of the better fight scenes in movie history, and then cast Chris Sarandon as a prissy villain every audience member wanted taken down. Rob Reiner could do it all, and always out of generosity rather than ambition. He knew how to identify great material, and then stay out of its way. Never was that quality more evident than with The Princess Bride. It’s a movie that, like Rob Reiner himself, knew just how to please a crowd.
- Drew Magary
