Details about the deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer are still coming in as I write this. Everything we learn about the story is awful, and I would prefer to attempt to celebrate Reiner's work and life rather than despair over this nightmare at the end of it.
So let's start with the start of his career as a movie director. These were Reiner's first seven films, from 1984 through 1992:
This Is Spinal Tap: It didn't invent the mockumentary form (or even the rock mockumentary form), but Spinal Tap — a tight collaboration between Reiner (who also played film-within-the-film director Marty DiBergi), Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer — perfected it, and is still the standard against which all others are judged, more than 40 years later.
The Sure Thing: Admittedly, I haven't seen this one — a road trip romantic comedy, starring John Cusack (in his first real lead role) and Daphne Zuniga as bickering college students who inevitably fall in love — in decades. But I remember being wowed by it back in the day, and no less than Roger Ebert called it "a special love story."
Stand By Me: The first of two Reiner adaptations of a Stephen King story (in print, it was called The Body). Like Spinal Tap, this period coming-of-age tale didn't invent its particular subgenre, but is such a spectacular example of it that it set a terribly high bar for anyone else trying to do it afterwards.
The Princess Bride: Like Peter Falk tells grandson Fred Savage in the framing device, Reiner and William Goldman's adaptation of Goldman's novel has got it all: "Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles." The Princess Bride is that rarest, most delightful of movie miracles: a hilarious parody of a particular genre (swashbuckling adventure and romance) that is also a brilliant representative of the real thing. While recapping last week's episode of Pluribus, of course my thoughts turned to Princess Bride master swordsman Inigo Montoya.
When Harry Met Sally...: Reiner and Nora Ephron's tale of best friends (Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, neither ever better) who take forever to realize they're in love with each other is the greatest modern movie romantic comedy. The only debatable point is whether it's the greatest movie romantic comedy of any era.
Misery: The other King adaptation (and his second collaboration with William Goldman, who wrote the script), it is a lean, mean, and chilling tale that turned unknown character actress Kathy Bates into an Oscar winner and improbable movie star.
A Few Good Men: When you hear people lament the death of the mid-budget movie for grown-ups, A Few Good Men is the exact kind of film they're thinking of. Reiner and Aaron Sorkin (adapting his own acclaimed stage play) brought together Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland (back from Stand by Me), Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, and many more for a witty, stirring, propulsive military courtroom drama full of big speeches and iconic moments and lines.
And, again, those were his first seven films. This is impossible. Steven Spielberg's first seven includes the bloated farce of 1941, for instance. Even when Hall of Fame directors manage to churn out seven good ones at the start of their career, they're rarely as varied or as consistently outstanding as these.
Though they're all very different kinds of films, you can see some clear patterns here. First, Reiner loved to work with great writers like Guest, Goldman, and Ephron. He had an eye for identifying future stars (all four Stand By Me kids went onto successful careers, though some were derailed by personal struggles and tragedy). And he and his gifted collaborators had a knack for executing each genre at such a high level that you couldn't blame anyone who would look at them and say, "Yeah, I can't top that. Maybe I should try something else?"
Reiner's reputation as a director notoriously took a sharp left turn with his eighth film, the whimsical North, which inspired the aforementioned Roger Ebert to write perhaps the most vicious pan of his whole career, which included the infamous line, "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie."
He rebounded after that by reteaming with Sorkin for 1995's The American President, a White House-set romcom that in hindsight was a rough draft for the characters Sorkin would write on The West Wing. But that was more or less it for Reiner's Hall of Fame period. He did some interesting things later on — his 2023 documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, about his lifelong best friend, was terrific — but there was also a lot of forgettable junk like The Story of Us and Rumor Has It... in those later years.
But those later, lesser films don't really matter when we look back on Reiner's career. It's not just that that initial run was so astonishing. It's that that run isn't even what he's most famous for!
That's what happens when you spend eight seasons co-starring on one of the most acclaimed, influential, and just plain iconic television shows ever made.
Reiner was only 23 when he filmed the pilot for Norman Lear's culture clash sitcom All in the Family, starring Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker, a bigoted, retrograde blue-collar slob forever arguing with his son-in-law over the state of the world. That pilot was actually Lear's third attempt to remake the British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part. The first two were titled Justice For All and then Those Were the Days, and featured Tim McIntire and then Chip Oliver as Archie's son-in-law, at the time named Richard. Though O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were obviously well cast as Archie and his wife Edith, something wasn't clicking. Then Lear took one more crack at it, bringing in Sally Struthers as their daughter Gloria, and hiring Reiner as the renamed son-in-law, Michael Stivic, a college student whose liberal beliefs led him to disagree with Archie on virtually every subject.
With Struthers and Reiner aboard, everything about the dynamic clicked. Reiner grew up in New York as his father Carl was becoming a star himself as a co-star and writer for legendary Fifties sketch comedian Sid Caesar, and then as co-creator of workplace sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show — which, like many of Rob's films, would set the standard that everything following it would have to work very hard to meet, let alone surpass. He had the right New York attitude to not simply be a punching bag that Archie could knock down over and over. (It helped that Reiner was both taller and broader than O'Connor.) Though the show was clearly on Mike's side, it also let him be a fool in his own right — lazy and smug, among other foibles — so that it never felt like the audience was being lectured, by either Mike or by Norman Lear. The two actors together were explosively funny, and the dynamic between the characters was so elementally funny that the writers could have them argue over virtually anything and generate huge laughs. It didn't have to be about politics or sociology. It could be something as simple as the proper order in which to put on your socks and shoes:
All in the Family was the most popular sitcom of the Seventies, and such a phenomenon that Richard Nixon could be heard on Oval Office recordings talking about the show. It made room for American television to be more explicit about politics, sex, and even going to the bathroom. And in lovable bigot Archie, it gave us the prototype that would, decades later, allow for the likes of Tony Soprano and Walter White. And none of it would have worked without Reiner as O'Connor's foil.
Reiner won two Emmys for the role, but he had other things on his mind, and he and Struthers left the sitcom after its eighth season. (Without Mike and Gloria, All in the Family struggled through a ninth season before admitting defeat and retitling itself as Archie Bunker's Place.) Reiner would periodically dabble in acting afterwards, including a very funny and sweet turn on the most recent season of The Bear. But he loved working behind the scenes. Before All in the Family, he was a writer on Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a controversial, ahead of its time variety show that got canceled after too many run-ins with the CBS censors. Like Penny Marshall (to whom he was married from 1971-81) and Ron Howard, Reiner was able to parlay a role in a hit Seventies sitcom into a successful directing career. Which, again, began with [checks notes] This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, and A Few Good Men.
A legend. No doubt about it.
Think for a second, by the way, about what it must have been like for Rob Reiner at the start of his career as an actor and writer. His father was one of the most important, impressive comedic minds of the first two decades of television. (Beyond Dick Van Dyke Show and his work with Sid Caesar, Carl and best friend Mel Brooks were beloved talk and variety show staples with their 2000 Year Old Man sketches.) The term "Nepo Baby" didn't exist when Rob was breaking into the business in the Sixties, but he's the kind of person for whom the phrase was coined. Imagine what it must have been like for him trying to build a name for himself, while everyone associated that name with Carl, and looked at him either as a pretender to the throne, or as someone who only had a job because of his father.
Yet as extraordinary a career as Carl Reiner had, Rob's was probably better(*).
(*) Like son, like father: Carl had his greatest success as a movie director teaming with Steve Martin on films like The Jerk and All of Me. But Rob worked with Martin first, as Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour writing partners.
Earlier this year saw the release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, an extremely belated sequel that saw Marty DiBergi filming the band as they got back together for one final concert. It was, like a lot of Reiner's later work, too unfocused to really work. It couldn't quite decide whether it was still there to make fun of these rock dinosaurs, or to celebrate them because they had become so beloved outside of their own fictional universe. And it only briefly touched on the idea of Nigel Tufnel and the others being angry with Marty for how he portrayed them in the first film, which would seem to be a huge potential source of humor.
Yet as I was absorbing each new terrible detail about Reiner and Singer's deaths, I found myself thinking back on The End Continues with deep affection rather than disappointment. Reiner was never able to recapture the lightning he had managed to bottle for the first phase of his directorial career. But at least he got to return to where it all started, back in the familiar baseball cap, still trying to make sense of the buffoonery of Nigel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls.
And if the movie as a whole doesn't work, its last joke very much does. (Spoilers follow for a movie I suspect a lot of people will be chasing down over the next few days, albeit for tragic reasons.) One of the best running gags in the original film is that the position of Spinal Tap drummer is cursed, with all of them dying in bizarre, often inexpclicable ways. The End Continues seems to flip the joke on its head, as the film climaxes with the elder members of the band (plus very special guest Elton John) all being horribly injured when a piece of the set falls on them during the concert, while new drummer Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco) escapes unscathed. But at the very end of the end credits, we see Marty interviewing Didi about how she beat the odds, only for her to start choking on food, as a panicked Marty rushes in to attempt the Heimlich maneuver.
All in the Family gave Reiner plenty of jokes, but his primary function was to set up Carroll O'Connor to get the biggest laughs. In the original Spinal Tap, he's the straight man to Guest and the others. And as a director in that remarkable seven-film streak, he subsumed any pretense of an individual directing style in service of whatever that particular film needed. The movies were never about Rob Reiner, because he only cared about making them great, not about making sure you knew he was the one doing it.
But the funniest joke of the final film released in his lifetime has him front and center, a ridiculous look on his face, Marty finally allowed at the very end to be a key part of the story, rather than the one holding the audience's hand through it.
The hour is very late, yet all I want to do right now is fire up a Rob Reiner movie. If only I could settle on which one.
