Not even the horrific circumstances under which he died Rob reiner and his wife, Michele, for which he is responsible, to make the tragedy greater, their son Nick, did not prevent an exceptional filmmaker from being spoken about with the necessary decency. Moreover, the shameful Truth Social post Donald Trump (it seems that such a malicious attitude regarding the death of a significant artist has never come from an official address) pointed out the sad fact that, in today's broader context, Reiner was more known as a political figure about whom there were completely divided opinions, than as a director who made several such recognizable film works whose status as modern American classics is guaranteed. For the majority of the public, Reiner was a controversial (democratic) activist, so it was easy to forget the value of an opus that embodied, at least in the first and best phase, an integral part of the fascinatingly renewed poetics of New Hollywood.
True, Reiner is in his nineties, with A Few Good Men (A Few Good People, 1992), The American President (American President, 1995) and Ghosts in Mississippi (The Ghosts of Mississippi, 1996) entered liberal political terrain, but this could not challenge the author's earlier aesthetics to the point of complete denial. Later works, such as The Story of Us (The Story of Us, 1999) and The Bucket List (The Last Wish List, 2007), no longer had the required strength or stylistic precision, and the general quality was in constant decline, perhaps due to the simple fact of the director's hyperproduction, but all this will not distract from the exceptional series of Reiner's first six or seven films (the signatory of these lines would not, however, include A Few Good Men) when it seemed he couldn't make a wrong move.
Not only because of the specific moment of commemoration after a terrible crime, the fundamental qualities of the director should be sought primarily in his best films. Reiner's debut This is spinal tap (This is Spinal Tap., 1984) functions not only as a satirical review of a certain, already devalued rock mythology that has inevitably begun to turn into its own opposite, but also as an anticipatory parody of a film-music style that is still used today by less conscious directors who do not realize that their 'mimetic' stylization has been largely deconstructed, and that the search for authenticity beyond performance only leads to the boring reinforcement of stereotypes.
This is spinal tap is a humorous mockumentary: we follow the fictional English group Spinal Tap on their failed American tour, revealing the band's creative and personal conflicts. This framework provides an opportunity for Reiner - who here plays Marty DiBergi, the director of the 'documentary', which further enhances the metatextual, that is, quasi-realistic effects of the film - to describe with the necessary comedy the already typed and well-worn 'trajectories' of famous bands as they struggle to cope with fame (or lack of fame) and internal problems: 'drama' is, in principle, reduced to a series of banalities.
But many did not seem to get the author's joke: still a good part of the biographical production about rock groups is done in the manner This is spinal tap, only without Reiner's humorous detachment. That's why the film - neither stylistically, nor meaningfully, nor on the level of penetrating criticism of rock phenomenology - has lost none of its topicality.
On the other hand, it is based on the most tender story in the entire opus Steven King, The, Stand by Me (Stay with Me, 1986) tells the story of four friends who go in search of a boy's corpse: their journey is, at the same time, a boyish and serious adventure that will, in fact, profile their characters. It is about marking that experience of growing up that is truly formativno: or Stand by Me The presence and effect of (another's) death is a crucial, borderline moment that inevitably means for the child a slow entry into the symbolic order of 'serious' life, it means abandoning carelessness that can no longer be afforded, it means recognizing one's own fragility, a fundamental initiation.
But, unlike, say, Loach's Kes (1969) which poignantly shows the negative dimension of such existential transition, Reiner's film turns to a similar existential insight with nostalgia, because that experience was divided between friends, and thus justified, turned into a common code. That is why Stand by Me one might conclude that the deepest friendships are formed in childhood, when closeness and connection are most needed in the face of a threatening future: stay with me.
Narrator in Stand by Me is a writer who reconstructs a privileged childhood event: the film is a realistic evocation, an (auto)biographical sentimental journey into the past. Likewise, in The Princess Bride (The Princess Bride, 1987) the narrative process itself is emphasized, 'made known', because what is being narrated needs suspension of disbelief in a time when even children lose their illusions too quickly: here the narrator is a grandfather who reads a fairy tale, a book, to his grandson. Princess Bride.
Since the audience is already 'more demanding', less inclined to easy fantasy, the plot itself cannot be 'fluid' and intriguing if it is not, at appropriate narrative junctions, questioned and commented upon, first by the boy himself. Reiner and his screenwriter William Goldman They know that a fairy tale will be accepted, that it will provoke emotional participation, only if the story is told with constant play - sometimes harsh, sometimes gentle, but always humorous - precisely with the 'outdated', overly fantastical conventions of fairy tales.
In that view, The Princess Bride can be taken as one of the possible role models for today's mega-popular cartoons, which owe their success at the box office to the ability to entertain both children and adults to the same extent.
Yet Reiner's most mature film came about in a space that was probably most in need of dynamic modernization: a key film in the rehabilitation of romantic comedy in the post-classical era, When Harry Met Sally ... (When Harry Met Sally, 1989) is - building on the ideas Woody Allena - showed how this genre in New Hollywood naturally and logically grew out of screw ball heritage.
The battle of the sexes still remains in focus, the disproportion between male and female conceptions of things - with sex as a common 'territory' where different interests can overlap - is manifested in witty verbal exchanges, and the former screw ball the 'irresponsibility' that released repressed erotic tensions was again restrained by numerous social and gender anxieties. Reiner succeeded - especially through his brilliant work with Meg Ryan i Billy Crystalom - to place the broader implications where they belong, in a symptomatic background, and to focus on the interaction of the two protagonists, on the details and nuances that precisely reveal the contemporary male-female dynamic that very often falls into apocryphal disputes.
In this way, the generic essence was preserved, and a new sophistication and sophistication was added to the genre expression: with When Harry Met Sally ... the romantic comedy has become overwhelmingly intellectual.
In his most successful films, Reiner is a director of well-intentioned irony, irony that will not hurt anyone, humor that always tends to make the protagonists close and likable. Perhaps that is precisely why he was able to When Harry Met Sally ... misses the gender configuration within the romantic vision through cynical recontextualization without in any way violating the fundamental emotional flows without which romantic comedy cannot be articulated satisfactorily, i.e. genre-wise adequately.
Regardless of whether this was a strategic decision (the undeniable quality of the script would support this) Nore Ephron) or just a lucky circumstance that Reiner's foothold was so well-equipped for the necessary job of restoring the vitality and reach of romantic comedy: the more ironic realism or 'sobering' humor is (externally) injected into this analysis of gender entanglements, the film When Harry Met Sally ... increasingly reproduced the basic generic trajectory and unshakable faith in the validity of genre experience in portraying male-female relationships.
Moreover, such a mode became paradigmatic in the further development of the genre: in a cynical time, it is precisely the recognition of one's own cynicism that is the most important shortcut to confirm the ability to arrive again at cinematic - however problematic - tender sentimentality. In this sense, Reiner was in the right place at the right time: When Harry Met Sally ... not only triumphantly opened the door for the creative advancement of romantic comedy, but also strikingly reflected what the director's crucial advantage consisted of.
If Reiner's poetics are so temporally determined, determined by specific temporal imperatives, then it is not difficult to conclude that the director's golden days were firmly placed in the eighties. Reiner's playfulness in This is spinal tap, consistently and without prejudice developing 'low-genre' road movie basics in a teenage framework in The Sure Thing (A sure thing, 1985), surrendering to the impulses of pure male (infantile) melodrama in Stand by Me, a disarming reading of male-female paradoxes in When Harry Met Sally ... (later it was The Sure Thing could also serve as an example of the author's overlapping themes in his work), professionalism in processing material that does not 'suit' him in Misery (1990), it all seemed like some kind of necessary extension of the New Hollywood poetics.
The entertainment was supported by a strong aesthetic legitimacy and the director was able, without too much semantic concern, to devote himself to his little, good people who, as a rule, manage to elicit sympathy from the audience: a cheerful spirit is something that decisively characterized the author. That is why there are no themes or motifs in Reiner's work that would in any way reflect the horror that ultimately occurred in his private life. Except for one such melodramatic and, retroactively, telling detail: Chris Chambers (impressively played by the tragically, prematurely deceased River Phoenix) who is, in a sense, the human center of the film Stand by Me, will be stabbed while trying to separate the quarreling people. Which is now also a nostalgic reminder that Reiner's fiction possessed a special emotional resolution and rehabilitation.
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