When the news reports first dropped that two people had been found dead in Rob Reiner’s house in Brentwood, Calif., I’ll admit that the idea that Rob Reiner might be among them didn’t even occur to me. At 79 years old, the man’s energy was scarcely diminished. The idea of him dying seemed implausible, and as for him being murdered? Who’d want to kill the guy who directed The Princess Bride?
Unfortunately, it is true. The actor and director’s 32-year-old son Nick Reiner is now being charged with the murder of his father and his mother, Michele Singer Reiner. The young Reiner had openly discussed his history of drug addiction and homelessness, and had co-written the semi-autobiographical screenplay for Being Charlie, which his father directed in 2015. I haven’t seen that film, but I’m sure it is currently being picked over for anything that might be taken as foreshadowing this terrible event.
(Before we move on, let’s spare a thought for the other murder victim here. Michele Singer Reiner had her own impressive careers, and convinced her husband to change the ending of When Harry Met Sally….)
To be perfectly honest, Reiner’s career as a director was pretty well dead by the mid-1990s. Before that, he had a hellacious winning streak that lasted the decade before that. (Some people might include Stand by Me in that streak. I wouldn’t, but I understand if you would.) The craftsmanship he brought to those films in his golden hour is impeccable. The Princess Bride came along at a time when audiences were ready for a fractured fairy-tales approach to a fantasy movie. Other friends-to-lovers romantic comedies have come along since When Harry Met Sally…, but that movie remains fresh and perspicacious. A Few Good Men holds up astonishingly well as a legal thriller whose twists and turns (as well as Aaron Sorkin’s jokes) keep it from turning stodgy and self-important like other such movies.
(And I remember watching that film 33 years ago this December. After Colonel Jessep has been exposed, he bends down to pick up his uniform cap off the floor before being taken into custody, and I remember thinking back then, “Ooh, that’s a good shot.”)
Of course, This Is Spinal Tap more or less invented the mockumentary comedy. There’s a throughline from that movie through Christopher Guest’s comedies to both versions of The Office to the Frat Pack’s comedies of the 2000s to the improv stylings of Bottoms. Come to think of it, it’s puzzling why Reiner didn’t take charge of one of those Frat Pack movies. Anchorman cast Fred Willard as Ron Burgundy’s boss on the strength of his performances in Spinal Tap and Guest’s Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. With Reiner’s eye for pacing and character beats, he might have made something brilliant with Jack Black or Will Ferrell.
It probably would have been better than what he actually did back then. Maybe the shortcomings of The American President can be chalked up to Sorkin’s tendencies as a writer, but you can’t blame him for the self-indulgent mess that was 1994’s North, with a 13-year-old Elijah Wood traveling the world to audition a new set of parents. His films from the 2000s make for depressing reading: The Story of Us, Alex & Emma, Rumor Has It…, The Bucket List. Formulaic, high-concept stuff that contained very little of the stuff that made his earlier films so good.
He started out as an actor, and before people were using the word “chill” to describe an attitude, he embodied that quality on the hit sitcom All in the Family as the hippie intellectual Michael “Meathead” Stivic, whose long hair and 1960s counterculture views infallibly pissed off Archie Bunker. He knew how to make his upbeat personality and coolness curdle into shallowness and arrogance, and other great film directors were happy to use it when they cast him as an actor. Woody Allen cast him as a more grown-up and less conscientious version of Meathead in Bullets Over Broadway, a blowhard whose air of decisiveness is enough to steal Mary-Louise Parker away from John Cusack’s ineffectual artiste.
In Mike Nichols’ Postcards from the Edge, Reiner plays a Hollywood executive who forces Meryl Streep’s fresh-out-of-rehab star to take a drug test in his presence, and when she asks him if he wants blood or urine, he says, “Urine will be fine” with an aggravating obliviousness to the humiliation he’s inflicting on her. A decade later, he played a similar type in Ron Howard’s EdTV, who only agrees to take Matthew McConaughey’s reality television show off the air when the latter threatens to reveal his penis-enlargement surgery on live TV. More recently, Martin Scorsese cast him as Jordan Belfort’s dad in The Wolf of Wall Street, and Reiner did yeoman work as a man trying to protect his son from his own worst instincts.
As an actor-turned-director, he had a special touch when directing his fellow thespians. He took an unknown Kathy Bates and let her become one of the great horror-movie villains in Misery. Meg Ryan was playing supporting roles in the likes of Top Gun and D.O.A. before he cast her as the lead in When Harry Met Sally… and set her on the path to headlining romantic comedies. Most Hollywood directors saw Demi Moore as someone hot; Reiner slotted her in as a professional, persistent, principled lawyer in A Few Good Men and showed audiences that a real actor was in there.
You can’t say this about many 79-year-olds, but Reiner probably had many good years left in him, given that his father Carl Reiner lived to be 98. As part of his political activism, he founded the organization that took down the homophobic Proposition 8 and was developing a TV series about the links between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. That prompted Donald Trump’s despicable trolling in the wake of Reiner’s death, which finally seems to have turned on the light bulb in some Republicans’ heads that the rapist in the White House has no class. If Reiner’s death contributed to the MAGA alliance deserting Trump, I’m sure he would be pleased.
But that’s not what we’ll remember him for. We’ll remember how his best movies sang with life and joy, and how they showed us the soul nourishment that Hollywood entertainment could offer up. We’ll remember Ryan faking her orgasm and Guest watching the tiny Stonehenge model descend from the ceiling and Kiefer Sutherland shooting Tom Cruise a look of murderous rage and “I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” What a legacy.
