In Memoriam: Rob Reiner

Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday. He was 78. The couple’s 32-year-old son Nick has since been charged with their murder. It feels impossible to process something so sad, stunning, and ghastly except to say that life is pain and anyone who says differently is selling something. I’m quoting a movie there, of course, Rob Reiner’s own “The Princess Bride” (1987). In doing so, I do not mean to be cruel or trivializing but to demonstrate how for so many of us, quotes from Rob Reiner movies are how we make sense of the world; like his dad Carl’s best friend Mel Brooks, Reiner was a western philosopher filtered through a Catskill comic’s microphone. I don’t know how many times I have contextualized some euphoric or intense experience in my mind by thinking, such and such went to eleven. Why just last Saturday afternoon My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, as she often does when discussing current events, underscored a point by declaring “money talks and bullshit walks.” The first time I told My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife that my favorite kind of pie was pecan, she immediately replied in her finest Billy Crystal, “I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.” It was one of my many early indicators that our love might just be like a storybook story.

The outpouring of grief in the wake of Reiner’s death stems from him being, as they say, a real mensch. A social liberal activist, he put his money where his mouth so often was, doing as much as anyone to help overturn California’s Prop 8 gay marriage ban in 2010. That was genuine winter soldier stuff in the image of Tom Paine. I often wondered if his increasing focus on political activism gradually caused the quality of his artistic output to run dry, but if such noble altruism was the tradeoff, that is a tradeoff worth making. Regardless, he was an accomplished actor, director, and producer who cut a whole swath of America on his way to success. He was born in the Bronx, went to high school in Beverly Hills, attended film school at UCLA, and cut his teeth apprenticing at a playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He came to prominence on the seminal 1970s television show “All in the Family,” winning two Emmy Awards along the way, before establishing himself as a Hollywood movie director in the 80s and helping found the independent film and television company Castle Rock. “Seinfeld,” to my mind the greatest TV show of all time, was made under its umbrella, and it avoided cancellation in its early days in no small part to Reiner going to the mattresses for it. Like I said, a mensch. 

Reiner made his first movie in 1984, right around the time I started going to and watching movies, and so like many people my age, he is synonymous with my first silver screen memories. Born in 1947, Reiner was a baby boomer, and his movies did not always have Gen-X sensibilities, necessarily, but they became our cultural touchstones, nevertheless. “The Princess Bride” was our version of a fairytale in so much as it was such a seamless blend of earnestness and irony that you could not tell where one ended and the other began. “Stand by Me” (1986) was the first movie My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife ever bought, back when buying a movie on VHS ran you roughly the same as a decent Bluetooth speaker. As a director, Reiner did not have a distinct style so much as a sturdy efficiency in the mold of classic Hollywood, underlining his ability to jump between genres. “Each film is completely different from the others,” wrote Roger Ebert in reviewing Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally...” (1989), “each one is successful on its own terms.” A master craftsman of mid-budget, middle class, sheerly watchable movies, I have long deemed “A Few Good Men” (1992) as the ultimate TNT Movie, easily digestible, unfailingly entertaining. His craft was so impeccable that even the heavily improvised “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) felt intentional every step of the way.

It was also his debut and like Guns N’ Roses and “Appetite for Destruction,” on his first try behind the camera, Reiner made his masterpiece. That is not to besmirch his ensuing work, merely to emphasize the immense groundbreaking quality of his debut, “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984).  Effectively the first comedic mockumentary, it remains the exemplar of the genre, and though pinpointing the funniest movie ever made is an exercise in futility, let’s just say, “This Is Spinal Tap” has a strong case, hilarious in every way, musically, visually, and verbally. Chronicling a fading English heavy metal band called Spinal Tap (Michale McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer), we see them through the eyes of Reiner’s documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi, explaining he was drawn to the group as a subject because of its “unusual loudness,” a line he says in consummate deadpan. As an actor, Reiner could be an outsized presence onscreen, as he was in “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), but in “This Is Spinal Tap" (1984), he did not go to eleven, more like a one or a two, his stone-faced performance tying the whole movie together. He takes Spinal Tap as seriously as they take themselves which is what makes it loving rather than patronizing.

Oddly enough, this past Saturday evening, a few hours after My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife had quoted Bobbi Flekman for the ten-thousandth time, we noticed “This Is Spinal Tap” was showing on HBO. Once we turned it on, we could not turn it off. And I was reminded that in a movie comprised almost entirely of side-splitting line readings, Reiner has a line reading that is the most side-splitting of all. It occurs when DiBergi asks Shearer’s Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls if playing rock and roll keeps him in a state of arrested development, to which Smalls opines that it is more akin to visiting a national park and seeing a moose that has been preserved. DiBergi repeats Smalls’s own observation back to him: “When you’re playing you feel like a preserved moose onstage?” Reiner’s comically flat line reading might as well be an encapsulation of life itself, the genuine struggle to find clarity where there is none.