It’s a sad day in Hollywood — an unthinkable, upsetting and all-around shocking day — when filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle could have been stabbed to death in their own home, allegedly by someone so close.
The particulars are hazy, the initial reports nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around. It’s clear that in the days ahead, the scandal will likely overshadow the career of one of the industry’s most beloved directors, a man widely admired for his work, his activism and his contagiously optimistic spirit. In the “100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time” list recently published by Variety, Reiner was responsible for no fewer than three of the entries.
I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that among American studio talents, I consider Rob Reiner the best director never to have been nominated for Best Director. Just look at his credits. The guy was the Billy Wilder of our generation: a filmmaker with an instinct for comedy who could operate across genres, making films with big, larger-than-life characters you recognized instantly and felt you’d known your whole life.
Reiner wasn’t a stylist like Martin Scorsese — the filmmaking idol on whom “This Is Spinal Tap” “director” Marty DiBergi was based (and for whom he finally got to act in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad). He wasn’t a visionary technological innovator like Robert Zemeckis — the performance-capture pioneer who took “The Polar Express,” a project Reiner had initiated with Tom Hanks, and made motion-picture history with it.
But he made at least six hall-of-fame films, practically one after another over the course of an 11-year run (a number forever associated with him). Reiner kicked off his directorial career with the endlessly quotable, mock rock doc “This Is Spinal Tap,” hitting new comedic heights straight out of the gate in 1984 by poking fun at an absurd (yet plausible) heavy metal band. Two years later, he delivered that greatest of coming-of-age films, “Stand by Me” — a movie featuring kids who really act like kids, facing the notion of mortality for the first time.
Then came what I’ve long considered to be my desert-island movie — as in, the one film I’d save if I was banished somewhere with a projector, a screen and a single print I’m certain I’d never get tired of watching: “The Princess Bride.” More on that in a minute. I was exactly the right age when that head-in-the-clouds, heart-on-the-sleeve postmodern fairy tale was released, but grown-ups at the time went crazy for his down-to-earth follow-up, “When Harry Met Sally…,” which almost singlehandedly revived the romantic comedy genre.
Right there, you’ve got four movies that defined the ’80s, and we haven’t even gotten to his two most acclaimed credits: “A Few Good Men,” the decade’s most-quoted (and surely also its most-rewatched) courtroom drama, in which Jack Nicholson bellows, “You can’t handle the truth!” at Tom Cruise’s self-righteous military lawyer. Reiner reteamed with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin three years later on “The American President,” another irresistible Hollywood romance, this one with a backbone idealistic enough to inspire “The West Wing.”
I know I’m not alone in adoring all six of those movies, though it’s telling that none are the type where one immediately thinks of the man calling “action!” Aaron Sorkin’s fingerprints are all over the latter two. “This Is Spinal Tap” is commonly associated with Christopher Guest, who went on to make several more improv-driven mockumentaries in the same mold. Nora Ephron often gets credit for “When Harry Met Sally…,” though the script was informed by where both she and Reiner were in their respective romantic lives at the time.
If Reiner gets too little credit, it’s because he had the wisdom and grace to subtract himself from the equation — by which I mean, when watching a Rob Reiner movie, audiences were never thinking about the director: how this shot was brilliant or that cut was clever. He wanted our attention to be focused on the characters, taking great care to cast each and every role with the absolute right actor, then trusting those performers to bring more than the script dictated to their parts.
There must be a case somewhere in Reiner’s filmography of someone being wrong for the role, but I can’t think of an example (then again, I never saw “North”). Instead, my mind goes to a dozen uncannily inspired choices in “The Princess Bride”: From Andre the Giant to Mandy Patinkin to Wallace Shawn, those actors fit their characters like a six-fingered glove (in Guest’s case, at least).
With “The Princess Bride,” Reiner accomplished the tricky task of blending several classic Hollywood genres — fairy tale romance, fantasy adventure, swashbuckling action and kid-friendly comedy — though the studio wasn’t sure what to make of it at the time. Like “This Is Spinal Tap” before it, it took time for audiences to embrace the film. Rest assured, those two cult favorites eventually found their following, to the extent that Reiner broke one of his own rules and finally made a sequel (“Spinal Tap II: The End Continues”) this year.
You can’t look at a Rob Reiner movie and reverse-engineer the man’s genius the way you can a film by Spielberg or Kubrick (though I’d argue “Stand by Me” is a better Stephen King adaptation than “The Shining”). The way I see it, there are three subtle but vital qualities that made Reiner’s movies so appealing.
First, there’s the way he worked with actors, inviting them to improvise. That was the basis of “Spinal Tap”’s success, and proved to be an asset throughout his career.
Second, as the son of Carl Reiner — and star of the incredibly successful ’70s sitcom “All in the Family” — Rob had either inherited or absorbed the principles of comedy, incorporating humor into all his films (it’s my opinion that all Hollywood movies are comedies, to some degree at least, and that this running sense of humor is what sets American cinema apart).
And third, he worked carefully on the scripts with his writers. Some projects he originated, via his Castle Rock shingle, and others he refined over rigorous brainstorming sessions. Sorkin has often credited Reiner’s process with making “A Few Good Men” into the rock-solid film it is. These days, too few studio directors polish their scripts to the same degree, worrying not just about dialogue, but structure, stakes and what makes a character feel real.
It makes sense that Reiner would be strong on those fronts. He met Mel Brooks when he was just four years old. Little Rob grew up at the feet of showbiz legends (his father, Carl, wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”), and he paid his dues, studying theater at UCLA, observing and learning from Norman Lear and directing TV movies before crossing over to film.
Reiner’s career stagnated somewhat in the 21st century, though he made a very funny, disarmingly intimate portrait of best friend Albert Brooks (no relation to Mel) for HBO two years ago, “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.” And of course, there was this year’s “Spinal Tap” sequel, which features more than a few sidesplitting moments — and a few epic cameos from the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John.
Can a filmmaker be both beloved and underappreciated at the same time? Rob Reiner was. Thinking of what happened to the 78-year-old mensch and his wife this weekend, one word comes to mind: inconceivable.
