As everyone is now aware, Rob Reiner has died at the age of 78. He was of the few funny cinematic chroniclers of the Baby Boom. Reiner was the son of Carl Reiner, who won about a dozen Emmys writing for Sid Caesar and Dick Van Dyke (who just turned 100) back in the 1950s-1960s. He then directed Steve Martin’s early movies: The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and others. The younger Reiner graduated high school in Hollywood, went to UCLA Film School, and of course followed his father into the movie business.
Reiner’s first big success came in All In The Family, the biggest sitcom of the 1970s. He played an impecunious student of sociology, dubbed Meathead by protagonist Archie Bunker. This was before social justice warriors took over academia. Meathead was butt of the jokes.
By the 1980s, Reiner and America had moved on. Reiner became one of the most influential artists who transformed pop culture in the direction of self-reference. His directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap (1984), made the departure from the earlier youth culture obvious. It’s the most influential “mockumentary,” one long series of pranks at the expense of a hapless fictional band on a tour that’s falling part. We see rockers, considered heroes from the hippie to the glam eras, as self-important fools, obsessed with sex and even more so with silly performances.
This Is Spinal Tap barely made any money, but it became a cult classic. So it eventually assumed its place in the Boomer pantheon, i.e. the National Film Registry, and the Library of Congress. One reason is that it was part of the first wave of nostalgia for the ‘60s. Mass media went from distributing the newest thing to remembering older things: memorializing, documenting, revisiting. A fervent anticipation of the future turned into an endless recalling of the past.
This is Spinal Tap has a simple plot, but it makes a very important point. In the film, “youth culture” is somehow preserved in the middle-aged rockers who cannot give up their dreams, as well as in the industry trying to make bank on them. At the same time, it passes away everywhere else. Although it looks back to the past, This is Spinal Tap turned out to be the future. Pretty much all rock acts went on to a zombie afterlife, forever recalling youthful feelings to nostalgic audiences, well into senescence.
Reiner’s next movie, just one year later, was another success in the rom-com The Sure Thing (1985), which made John Cusack’s career. In Cusack’s first starring role, at 18, you already see one of the leading men of the ’80s and one of the types of the Gen X man—tall, even athletic, but sensitive, funny, and musical, soft without being weak, and sensitive rather than neurotic or mad like ’70s actors. The Sure Thing mixed genres— romance, going to college, and the all-American road trip—and added an ‘80s soundtrack to get a feeling for the confusion of the time, a mix of social change and optimism, naivety and recklessness.
Another year on, Reiner changed genres again with Stand By Me (1986), adapting the 1982 Stephen King novella The Body into a sentimental story of rural boyhood innocence turning to experience, an all-American story. Nostalgic music from the ‘50s set the mood and Reiner again brought to light actors that would go on to major careers, with Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell in the lead roles. Stand By Me was Reiner’s biggest hit yet and it also received award nominations, from the Oscar for the screenplay to a couple of Golden Globes and the Director’s Guild.
For the fourth consecutive year, Reiner came up with a new genre, a new success, and a new cult film: The Princess Bride (1987), adapted from fabled Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman’s eponymous novel of 1973. Again, careers were made on the strength of the movie, from Cary Elwes and Robin Penn to Mandy Patinkin. Again, Reiner banked on a mix of comedy and nostalgia, in this case for the swashbuckling movies of Golden Age Hollywood.
Reiner wrapped the decade with his most famous movie, and biggest success to date, the middle-age rom com When Harry Met Sally (1989), starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Nora Ephron, who wrote the screenplay, also got an Oscar nomination. The movie depicts twelve years in the life of two Baby Boomers. The command they obey is to explore their freedom, find themselves, from college graduation to a career to settling down, through a confusion which it takes some artistic effort to render charming.
Repeated discussion of Casablanca and the standards soundtrack—Satchmo, Ella!—suggest a desire to return to an older, classier style of comedy, more playful, less obscene. The question is how to fix the problems of the sexual revolution, which made it impossible for men and women to be friends (the major theme of the story). So we get a story of adulteries and unhappiness, experience humbling people without making them the wiser. The surprise is a backward romance, where people get to know each other about a decade into their lives, since they didn’t really know themselves before.
None of Reiner’s 1980s movies were big hits. When Harry Met Sally made $93 million in 1989, but didn’t break the top ten of the year at the box office. His major hit, A Few Good Men (1992), which ended up making more than $140 million, was his weakest movie and the end of his successful period. He had adapted Stephen King again with Misery (1990), another success, starring James Chan and Kathy Bates by then, totaling seven successful movies in a decade, a rare achievement.
Instead, it was TV and VHS that made Reiner a household name. The mood, the emotions in Reiner’s best movies range from boyish fun to romantic earnestness, naivety, shyness. Reiner covered the times with a veil, one can almost say, of decency. He gave America a vision of the Baby Boom generation that we could watch safely at home and he accordingly became one of the late figures that could bring the nation together across ideological or even generational divides. Very few such are left.
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