1
Rob Reiner’s best movies are all about time—shared time. Some of them have “meet-cutes,” but they’re really about people who already know each other.
He was a wizard of ellipsis. The “…” in When Harry Met Sally… (1989) is the humble symbol of his art: he knew how to elide without erasing. How to convey, in 90 minutes, the shape and feel of a whole life with.
Stand by Me (1986) may be his saddest take on time, but tone was never one-note with him. Tone had melody. Even his goofiest comedies, from This is Spinal Tap (1984) to The Bucket List (2007), glimmer at their edges with the aura of death. Stand by Me’s sadness, meanwhile, is the rich, bittersweet sadness of real life. A sadness, like the Oregon woods where they shot it, dappled and streaked with light.
Stand by Me isn’t about death, per se. It’s about memory. It’s about the ways in which the people who matter do keep standing by us, even after they’ve fallen away.
He matters. And he’s standing by now, haunting this movie and filling it with grace.
2
Teddy wears a green shirt. Anger, the army, an animal wildness. It separates him from the rest.
Gordie wears a red shirt. The heart, or the blood.
Vern’s shirt has red, white, and blue stripes. A patriot, an American innocent? Or a follower, channeling the natures of others.
Chris wears a white shirt. A hero and a ghost. A man defiant, a boy already surrendered.
It’s a good foursome, loose and close, balanced. Different, together.
3
Stand by Me is small. Small in budget, small in runtime. Reiner came from the world of the small screen, and got his meager money, at the last second, from his old TV patron, Norman Lear. Even the boys are small.
But it’s also big, and not only in box-office and home-video receipts. On the one hand, its bigness is the barest, most classical bigness of cinema, free of explosions or effects. It’s the bigness of the vast image, of the launched, reverberating sound.
On the other hand, its greatest grandeur is temporal, and there, in the fourth dimension, Reiner knew that TV is actually bigger. He layered: the stretching day, the stretching decades. Paradoxically, his sitcom priorities enlarged his movies’ scope, making room for the fullness of relationships that last.
The time-course of Stand by Me is both 48 hours and 40 years. Its physical scale is that of 12-year-old feet and the 50-odd miles they walk. Its intellectual scale is that of 12-year-old brains, which is to say, bigger than you think.
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Reiner was a realist. He made movies, he once said, “about people that live on the earth.” But most real people are not realists. To depict them, us, is to depict our myths, our superstitions, our fickle memories and our phantasmal dreams. Our weirdness. To depict real people is to make metafiction.
Gordie (Wil Wheaton) asks Chris (River Phoenix), “Am I weird?” Chris answers, “Yeah, but so what? Everybody’s weird.”
Chris knows that Gordie, the budding fabulist, is not alone in making up strange stories. We spend the present telling ourselves, often insanely, what the past was and what the future will be. Maturity has less to do with telling your own stories than with realizing that others’ stories—even the most imperious grownups’ stories—are subjective, unstable.
Chopper, the junkyard dog, is perfectly friendly. Teddy (Corey Feldman) says his dad “stormed the beaches at Normandy”; the junkman says his dad’s a “loony.” Maybe both are telling the truth. Gordie will be forever inferior to his late brother—or their dad, in saying so, is really saying, I’m broken, blinded and scarred by grief.
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Does it count as a “Chekhov’s gun” if it goes off right away? And if, in the third act, it’s fired only into the air?
The gun, too, tells a story. Like the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride, it’s a threat more than anything. The pirate is the idea of a pirate. The gun is the idea of a gun.
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Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is the most marginal of the four, and the meekest, but it’s his quest.
Stand by Me consists of the reminiscences of “The Writer,” ostensibly an older Gordie, on the first time he saw “a dead human being.” Within this tale, there are further flashbacks. Usually they’re Gordie’s, but the first one is Vern’s: he recounts how he learned about the body.
If memory is a story, it’s not a story you can tell alone. If it’s a house, it has many rooms, and some of them were built, decades ago, by your third-closest friend.
7
Three vast images, wide shots, the boys tiny in the frame: in open fields, as they begin their journey; crossing a colossal trestle bridge, amidst colossal silence; crossing that bridge, moments later, pursued by a giant, bellowing, billowing steam train.
They move left to right, always. Oregon, chosen over Stephen King’s Maine, lends a Western openness. The landscapes are lush and verdant, though, no red rocks in sight, and left-to-right reads as eastward.
They’re not on a set path. They’re delving back into America, and heading somewhere new.
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Reiner worked with great writers—William Goldman, Nora Ephron, Aaron Sorkin—and sometimes suffered the fate, rare for a director, of being overshadowed by them. He liked King, especially in non-paranormal mode, and Stand by Me hews closely to King’s novella The Body.
The key alteration, Reiner has said, was to make Gordie “the central focus of the piece.” It’s true that the movie strengthens Gordie’s solo arc. He purges his emotions over his brother’s death and his father’s contempt. He takes a stand against the gang of older bullies. In the book, Chris fires the gun; in the movie, Gordie.
In truth, Reiner made two greater contributions. He gave the movie his signature economy. And he made the “central focus” not Gordie, but Gordie’s friendship with Chris.
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Stand by Me came out 40 years ago, on August 22, 1986, and is set in late summer, 1959. Reiner was born six months before King, and may have changed the setting from 1960 to ’59 to match the summer when he was twelve.
Cigarettes tucked into T-shirt sleeves, Brylcreemed hair, and early rock-n-roll all telegraph late-50s. But most of the songs that set this mood—“Great Balls of Fire,” “Book of Love,” “Get a Job,” “Yakety Yak”—cue the appearance of the rival gang, back in Castle Rock. Ace Merrill (Kiefer Sutherland) and his goombahs, the self-dubbed Cobras, are the ones with leather jackets, Ford convertibles, West Side Story camp and West Side Story knives.
The four boys walk the woods in silence, or in talk. They walk with nothing but each other.
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They’re growing up, graduating from boyhood. But they’re also moving out of time, touching—not timelessness—time’s expanse.
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This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, A Few Good Men. It’s an astounding first decade of directing. Six acclaimed classics in six different genres—and the seventh, The Sure Thing, is a poignant parable of young love, silly and wise, under-sung and under-seen.
The range Reiner showed was oddly self-effacing. But they’re all his, including in their reflection of his collaborative spirit, which extended even to the audience. They’re movies that don’t aim to please the masses, to pander, so much as to be massively felt: to encourage felt identification, felt recognition of the real.
Feeling, he knew, doesn’t mean sentimentality. Often it means pain.
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He approached filmmaking as a friend—as if he’d be happy with “Friend” as his official credit.
The movies themselves are an eclectic group of friends. Different, together.
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When the boys do have music, it’s diegetic, either from a tinny transistor radio (the launched sound) or from themselves, sung aloud.
There comes a sense that music, maybe all culture, doesn’t suit this journey. They start out jovially chanting the theme from the Western show Have Gun Will Travel. When Vern reprises it, after they’ve braved a couple trials, it dies in his throat.
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Two handheld tracking shots, each over a minute long, mark their proper departure from civilization. The first includes all four, walking side by side. It’s a subtle showcase for the characters’ easy bond, and for the actors’ naturalism.
In the second, Teddy and Vern move past the camera, which holds on Gordie and Chris. This is the moment when Gordie asks, “Am I weird?” Chris then remarks that their paths may split in junior high—Gordie will be taking “the college courses.”
Four will give way to two, this wending shot seems to promise, but two won’t give way to one and one. They talk about divergence; they keep walking the same track. They stand by.
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The train is what killed Ray Brower, the boy whose body they’re going to see. And the train’s is the track they follow.
The track stretches before them, the sky stretches above them (exquisite blue, one of the bluest skies on film), and summer stretches around them. Summer allows them their vital pause. It’s the best portal kids have into the expanse of time.
Life yawns, wide open, as we walk the track laid for the agent of death. The boys need to know the space to know the inescapable narrowness. They need to know the narrowness to know the space.
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Stand by Me is full of bad men: a hodgepodge of abusive fathers, hitting, haranguing, drinking, judging. Plus the Cobras, pitifully eager to join them.
Other than Gordie’s late brother, Denny, who may be idealized in memory, only one character bucks the trend, a grocer who appears in a single quiet scene. In The Body, he’s just another negative example, aiming to cheat Gordie, his thumb on the meat scale. In the movie, he’s level. Fair. He asks Gordie, “What do you do?”
It’s an interesting question to ask a twelve-year-old. It sounds unusually open, existential, here.
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Vern’s favorite word is “sincerely.” O’Connell, only 11 during filming, invests him with perfect sincerity.
The boys live by an avoidant code: don’t be “pussy,” don’t be “asshole.” If you have to be one, better to be “asshole.” And yet, when Teddy breaks down, upbraided by the junkman, he doesn’t apologize for his emotion. No one “ranks him out.”
Maybe tears aren’t “pussy” if they’re angry.
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Stephen King didn’t write “So what? Everybody’s weird.” Nor did he write “You okay?” which Chris asks Gordie three separate times. Nor “It’s okay, man,” which Chris repeats to Teddy. Phoenix makes the word “okay,” every time, both completely casual and extraordinarily tender.
The voice, at these moments, is Reiner’s. Phoenix gives Chris a hardness, a flinty dignity, but it’s a hardness that admits of softness within—not the melting core of fear, but the suppleness of care. He’s a mensch. He’s the only one who knows what all the actors must have learned from Reiner: a man can be tender. Should be.
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At the midpoint of the movie, the boys smoke around a campfire.
The central moment is not a moment of action, of drama. Or, the central dramatic action is nothing but being together. Finding, in the instant, the expanse.
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As they smoke, Teddy says, “I cherish these moments.” The others all laugh.
Is it “pussy” to cherish? (How about to have, to hold, to love?) It’s certainly sincere, so why is it Teddy, the rambunctious hothead, who can admit to cherishing, and not sincere Vern?
Maybe it’s because Teddy is fearless. The others are cherishing the moment, too, but can’t match Teddy’s bravery in saying it.
Maybe it’s because Teddy is wise. He’s lived the hardest life. For all his hijinks, pushing Vern around, dodging cars and trains, he knows the value of an interval of calm, free of storm and stress. The others aren’t cherishing the moment like he is.
Maybe it’s because Teddy can’t let the moment be. In The Body, the older Gordie contends that “speech destroys the functions of love.” In this view, Teddy’s voiced appreciation for the moment ruins the moment. In this view, all speech, even all memory, is a tragedy—every word, every image, incommensurate to the vanished real thing.
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Which is it?
King tells you which. Reiner lets you watch this story, and tell your own story about it.
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Most of the flashbacks—including the first one, from The Writer’s present to 1959—are marked by dissolves, slow overlaid fades, which add a gauzy layer of nostalgia. When Gordie tells a campfire story, by contrast, we cut directly, coldly, to the world of his fiction. Whole-cloth invention seems to attain a higher truth value, or at least a greater clarity, than memory.
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All writing may be a tragedy. And yet creation may counteract loss. To lose the essence of the would-be signified is not to forfeit the chance to make something new.
Gordie’s story is weird. He’s not a realist. He may be a surrealist. Intriguingly, Reiner abets his surrealism cinematically. Gordie mentions “The Benevolent Order of Antelopes,” ersatz Elks, but he doesn’t mention the bizarre antler-hats we see them wearing. He mentions that David “Lard-Ass” Hogan, at a pie-eating contest, inspires the whole crowd to vomit, but he doesn’t mention that every last person vomits blue-purple, as if each, like Lard-Ass, has just eaten several blueberry pies.
Are we seeing what Gordie sees, in his mind’s eye? What he’s conjuring in the minds of his friends?
Whatever it is, it’s weird, and it’s okay.
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Spinal Tap’s ridiculous rock transformations. Walter Gibson’s sophomoric fantasies about the girl across the country who’s a “sure thing.” The entire fable of The Princess Bride, as told to a little boy by his grandpa. Even Harry and Sally’s projected notions of the good life, their certitudes about what they want and how they’ll get it. All surreal.
Reiner laughed at our surrealism, and validated it. Gave it credence, gave it representation, and sussed out its limits and its faults. Laughed at our stories, but with us, characters and viewers alike.
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Lard-Ass Hogan, like Ray Brower, is exactly the boys’ age. In this movie so preoccupied with the past and with the future (what will become of us, what will we amount to), the boys are also imagining variations on the present, alternate takes on 12. In one, random death. In another, calculated revenge.
Time can move sideways, too.
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When the boys discuss their cultural world, it’s Gordie who has insights to share—not answers so much as unanswerable questions. Why do they never get anywhere on Wagon Train? What kind of creature is Goofy?
Culture may not suit this journey, but talk about culture does. None of this is in The Body, or in Raynold Gideon and Bruce Evans’s screenplay. Reiner, before Quentin Tarantino, understood that knowing and caring about culture makes characters feel real. He wasn’t going for postmodern cleverness. He just wanted that feel, that sound. If Gordie’s questions weren’t his, in 1959, I bet they were his friends’.
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He put writers onscreen: the songwriters of Spinal Tap, Paul Sheldon in Misery, Sally Albright and many subsequent rom-com leads. In The Sure Thing, Gib finally wins Alison’s heart (and mind) by penning a thoughtful essay.
Writing, it’s often said, is boring to watch. Reiner knew it was compelling to watch someone who watches, who notices, who asks questions, who grasps that story is the fabric of life. It’s compelling to watch someone who cares.
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Lest you find dissolves too facile a tool, a nostalgic crutch, Stand by Me uses them to jump forward, marking the boys’ turns as night watchmen. Moments later, a dissolve leads us into Gordie’s dreams.
The scene is his brother’s funeral. Gordie’s dad tells him, “It should’ve been you.” Chris, earlier, has described a dream in which he fails to save Teddy from a tree, though in the actual instance, as Gordie reminds him, he didn’t fail.
Both are editing memory. Both are imagining worse than life has dealt them so far.
Dream adds yet another kind of story, a slippery, a dissolving kind: tough to isolate, tough to situate in time.
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The third time Chris asks Gordie “You okay?” there’s a bloodsucking leech in Gordie’s briefs. The second time, he has just woken up from his nightmare.
The first time is the easiest to miss. As they set out, still in town, Chris instantly sees something’s off, muted, in Gordie’s face.
Chris may not be a writer, but he’s a noticer. He knows his friend.
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“I’d like to go someplace where nobody knows me.”
That’s Chris’s wish at his rawest moment, the deepest confidence he shares. Punished for stealing milk money, he never told the truth, that he tried to give the money back. He knew he wouldn’t be believed. “Just suppose I told the story,” he says.
To be known, here, doesn’t mean to be understood. It means to have your story told for you.
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In the morning, the others still asleep, Gordie sees a deer staring back at him, only a few feet away. This encounter, we learn, is “the one thing I kept to myself.” An even deeper confidence: we’ve just heard Chris tell Gordie something he’s told no one else, and now Gordie, older, is telling us something he never even told Chris.
Beholding the deer, Gordie’s face—the fine, expressive face of Wheaton—takes on a Mona Lisa aspect. The barest lineaments of a smile. That look encapsulates the tonal music of the movie: fascination and fear, movement and stillness, a risky delight.
All that, and then it’s gone.
32
Over 20 minutes of screen time elapse between the moment the boys beat the train across the bridge and the moment the Cobras pile into cars, signaling an imminent confrontation. It’s a quarter of the movie, a quarter in which the boys simply keep each other company through the night, uninterrupted by crosscutting, score, or new obstacles to overcome.
The central moment is nothing but being together—and the moment goes on, expanding out of all proportion. It hangs out.
If Reiner went before Tarantino in featuring pop-cultural banter, he also went before Richard Linklater in understanding (and bringing down to earth from the likes of Tarkovsky) that film’s primary medium is not image, but time. His art of economy was an art of multiplication, extrapolation. If we spend twenty minutes (one night) with these boys, we might, down to our guts, know the meaning of two days (a life).
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Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.
Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.
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It’s Vern who spots the body, at last. It’s still his quest. For all the others, it’s really about something else. For Vern, it may really just be about this.
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When Gordie breaks down, mirroring Chris the night before, his refrain is, “He hates me”—his dad. Chris’s response is, “No. He just doesn’t know you.”
Chris knows his friend, and knows the value of this kind of knowing. To be known, here, means to be understood. To have a loyal audience for the story you’re telling.
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Tragically, Chris can’t apply that knowledge to his own case. He can’t refer the part of him that wants to go “someplace where nobody knows me” to the part of him that knows Gordie is right here, knowing him in the good way, the best way.
Raised in a world of men horrible to others, they’ve become better to others than to themselves. The movie leaves unanswered whether they’ll ever meet what may be the final challenge of enlightened masculinity: to turn their tenderness inward.
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All through the confrontation with Ace, you don’t see Gordie. Until he fires the gun.
38
Then you don’t see Chris. As he and Gordie walk home, having bade the others farewell, we see them only from behind, reflected in windowpanes, obscured by columns, as if civilization immediately blocks and confuses all that was open and simple in the woods.
As The Writer relates grownup Chris’s fate—freakishly knifed to death at a restaurant, trying to break up a fight—12-year-old Chris waves to Gordie, turns, and disappears.
You might find this, Stand by Me’s most famous shot, its falsest note. I have, at times. But it’s yet another variety of dissolve, a quirk of the movie’s grammar rather than a departure therefrom. It reminds us we’re in the perplexing realm of memory, and of writing. If this is over-egged, it’s likely the over-egging of The Writer. His story, too, can wobble, and besides, by all appearances, this is only his first draft.
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It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that Reiner launched many careers, though he wouldn’t have said so himself. He definitely noticed, fostered, furthered. Ephron, Sorkin, Sutherland, John Cusack, Meg Ryan, Kathy Bates, Frank Darabont, cinematographer Robert Elswit, Christopher Guest and his droll band of mockumentarians: all got more, and better, from Reiner (and Castle Rock, the company birthed from Stand by Me) than they’d ever got before.
Did he launch the four boys? Wheaton, Feldman, and O’Connell are still best known for these performances, and Phoenix was dead at 23.
He knew them, anyway. He hung out with them, playing improv games for two weeks before filming. He listened to their stories, and respected, equally, their rights not to tell them. For the milk money scene, he asked Phoenix to “think about a time that an adult let you down,” but never asked, afterward, what it was.
That’s Phoenix’s deer. We’ll never know, but it seems safe to assume he wasn’t thinking about Reiner.
40
He knew the beauty of broken illusions. An artist of comedy, mostly, he nonetheless didn’t traffic in “happily ever after.” “Realistically ever after” is more like it.
Nigel and David reconcile by accepting that Spinal Tap is nearly kaput. Gib realizes he was chasing the wrong girl, the fantasy girl. Westley and Buttercup renounce their grand, ill-fitting titles; the kid likes The Princess Bride, but knows it’s his grandpa that’s real. Annie Wilkes not accepting that novels are fiction is a harrowing cautionary tale.
Harry and Sally, he thought, should end up friends. (He changed his mind only when he met Michele Singer, his wife of the next 36 years.) If they must fall in love, it must be with each other’s imperfections.
A life of disillusionment, he knew, is not a life of resignation. Keen feeling is not spoiled by consciousness of harder matters of fact—indeed, such consciousness only keeps feeling honest. Time passes. People pass. Life is short, simple, often brutal, often bare. Best to cherish the moments we have, together. Best to find a way not to transcend those moments, but to make those moments expand.