My Own Private Rob Reiner Film Festival

by Patrick Bromley

Revisiting the filmography of a guy who had a great run and then 30 more years of movies.

Last year, I did my very own private Robert Zemeckis film festival to coincide with the one going on at the Music Box in Chicago. I had such a good time doing it that I wanted to repeat the exercise this year but had no idea whose filmography to run. The suggestion to do Rob Reiner for this festival came from Adam Riske. Thank you, Adam!

The American President (1995)

I decided to start the festival off with The American President, either the best movie or the worst movie to watch right now. Michael Douglas plays an idealized (and widower'd) Commander-in-Chief who begins a romance with lobbyist Annette Bening in a sparkling romance that's just smart enough about politics while still mostly being wish fulfillment. This was the second time Reiner directed a script by A Few Good Men scribe Aaron Sorkin, who is more or less dry-running The West Wing here, and it's my preferred collaboration of the two. In fact, I'd go so far as to call this Top 3 Rob Reiner, and it would probably be the best movie in another director's filmography provided that director hadn't also made Stand By Me and The Princess Bride and Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally and Misery.

Michael Douglas is so good playing against type as a nice and decent human being and the ensemble class is insanely stacked. Reiner was neck and neck with Ron Howard in the '90s when it came to doing old-fashioned Hollywood storytelling; this is him doing Frank Capra but with a contemporary bent. The American President also finds Reiner rebounding after the debacle of North, but it wasn't enough to right the ship completely because it's his last great movie and it's 30 years old. He was clearly powerful when he made this one as it's a PG-13 movie with three "fucks" in it. I'm glad I started here; I love this movie so much I used to watch it in back-to-back viewings on TNT. I wish Andrew Shepherd was our president.

And So It Goes (2014)

Because I basically jumped off the Rob Reiner train in the late 1990s, there are a bunch of his movies from the last 20 years that I've never seen. I tried to do this marathon in a way that spaced those movies out because I suspect watching them all back to back would be a mistake. Reiner reteamed with American President star Michael Douglas for this 2014 romcom that I almost don't remember existing and certainly don't remember as being a Rob Reiner movie. Douglas is a grouchy realtor tasked with watching the granddaughter he didn't know he had when his estranged son has to go to jail; neighbor and would-be torch singer Diane Keaton is happy to help. This was a first time watch for me and there's almost none of the magic Reiner brought to his initial 10-year run; And So It Goes isn't bad, really, just mostly derivative and ordinary. It's part As Good As It Gets with Douglas playing the Nicholson role and part Something's Gotta Give with Diane Keaton playing the Diane Keaton role. It's pretty generic, though Douglas digs into his role and Keaton gets to sing, which is nice. I was weirdly surprised to find myself moved at the end.

The Sure Thing (1985)

Reiner's second feature proved that he knew how to work within established genres and, more importantly, that This is Spinal Tap was no fluke. Part It Happened One Night road movie, part traditional teen comedy, The Sure Thing sends a horny John Cusack and a buttoned up Daphne Zuniga across the country over their college's Christmas break, one in pursuit of reuniting with her boyfriend and the other in pursuit of a guaranteed one-night stand. Part of the genius of The Sure Thing is that it has the setup of an '80s sex comedy and then has its characters (and its director) resist those tropes at every turn, instead realizing they want something much greater. This is one of the best teen movies of the decade, with perfect performances by Zuniga and then-16-year old Cusack. When I had mono in high school, I watched this VHS on a continuous loop.

LBJ (2016)

Another new-to-me Rob Reiner movie, a biopic about Lyndon B. Johnson first during his days as JFK's vice-president and then becoming president after Kennedy's assassination. Woody Harrelson and Jennifer Jason Leigh play melting wax statues of LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson, respectively, in a film that feels like a Funny or Die sketch minus the jokes. It's clear that Rob Reiner means well in his examination of LBJ and the man's place in history, particularly his role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but this is a movie that could have been made by anyone who has seen four biopics and is well-versed in their cliches. There's little insight here into the man himself, much less the political stage on which he finds himself. I watched this movie wondering how the same guy who directed a 10-year string of bangers managed to make this. I'm still trying to figure it out. 

Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)

At this point in my festival I should have fallen back on something tried and true -- a Princess Bride or a Stand By Me -- but instead I went with another first-time viewing of the only movie I missed during Reiner's '80s and '90s run: 1996's extremely soggy Ghosts of Mississippi. Alec Baldwin plays the lawyer who reopens the case of the murder of Medgar Evers twenty-five years after his killer, a white supremacist played by James Woods (who didn't know cameras were rolling) was allowed to go free. Whoopi Goldberg plays Evers' widow in the closest thing the movie has to a good performance, though Woods did receive an Oscar nomination for his ridiculous turn as I-say I-say Byron De La Beckwith. Reiner's extremely liberal politics obviously align with my own, but this movie has little to say except that racism is bad; to make matters worse, it delivers its message through a white character who saves the day. Part of me thinks this was the director's last real attempt at making the kind of prestige ensemble picture for which he had become known. Its failure both creatively and commercially sent him retreating back to making comedies that feel like they were made for television. It's no good, but Ghosts of Mississippi represents the end of an era (era).

Alex & Emma (2003)

I saw Alex & Emma, Rob Reiner's return to the romantic comedy genre, on opening night back in 2003 and haven't thought about it since. There's a reason: it's about as forgettable as movies get. Luke Wilson plays a brilliant novelist (we know because he says out loud that he's a brilliant novelist) who owes tens of thousands of dollars to loan sharks and has to finish his new book in just 30 days so he can pay them from his $100,000 advance. He hires dowdied-up stenographer Kate Hudson to be his typist so he can dicatate the book; naturally, sparks begin to fly. The actors generate a little bit of charm in their scenes together, which are not helped at all by the dirty, dilapidated set used for Wilson's apartment or Hudson's brown wig; it's as though Reiner is determined to make the movie look bad. The "hook" of the movie is that there are also scenes which take place inside Wilson's shitty novel, an F. Scott Fitzgerald rip-off in which Hudson plays multiple parts. That stuff is worse than the real world stuff. It's hard to believe that this was directed by a once-great filmmaker like Rob Reiner, not because it's awful but because it's just so mediocre. I'm trying to understand what happened to him post-'90s and the only thing I can figure is that he lost his nose for good material.

A Few Good Men (1992)

Ok, time for something familiar and comfortable. This is a good movie! I maintain it's not a great movie, but it's good and the exact kind of old-fashioned ensemble film that Reiner was able to make when he was at the top of his game. Tom Cruise plays a hotshot lawyer assigned to defend two Marines responsible for the death of a fellow soldier. Were they acting of their own accord, or just following the orders of Col. Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson)? The cast is wall-to-wall ringers: Demi Moore, Kevin Pollack, Keifer Sutherland, JT Walsh, Kevin Bacon, Christopher Guest, and on and on. Aaron Sorkin's script, based on his own stage play, is smart and full of speechifying because Aaron Sorkin. Reiner directs in his best classical style so that the movie feels super old-fashioned in a good way and could be taking place in just about any time period. My problems with the movie remain my problems, which is that while Reiner has assembled a dream cast, he does them few favors by indulging some of their worst instincts -- particularly Cruise and Nicholson (two actors I love) at the center, who lean so hard on their respective bags of tricks that they're almost doing self-parody. I still like this movie and can watch it just about any time. I just wish I loved it.

Rumor Has It (2005)

We're back to the post-1995 dregs and another movie I haven't seen since theaters opening weekend. Boy does this movie not work. Maybe it never stood a chance; original director/screenwriter Ted Griffin was fired during production, which was shut down so that Rob Reiner could be hired to rework the script and recast several roles. Jennifer Aniston plays a woman who discovers her mom was the basis for Elaine Robinson in The Graduate and that her grandmother was Mrs. Robinson, so she seeks out Kevin Costner, who she believes could be her father and who provided the inspiration for the Benjamin Braddock character. Then they fuck. This is such a weird premise for a romantic comedy and there is so much to unpack here, but Rumor Has It doesn't seem to be interested in doing any of that. The script moves in fits and starts, the tone lurches from sappy to shrill farce, and I'm left wondering why a major studio thought this would appeal to a wide audience. The film has soft, sunny cinematography that looks great (it had better look great for its $70 million budget, though I'm sure part of that can be attributed to the production difficulties and shutdown), Costner charms on autopilot, and Richard Jenkins crushes it as always in a late-film monologue to Aniston. There is one good line, too, when Costner tells Jennifer Aniston "Life should be a little nuts. Otherwise it's just a bunch of Thursdays." Despite the bizarre and decidedly non-commercial premise, Reiner sands any edges off the film until it feels like just a Thursday.

Stand By Me (1986)

The older I get, the more I revisit it, the movie I'm convinced that Stand By Me is Rob Reiner's best movie. I know that it isn't -- he also made The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally and This is Spinal Tap -- but it feels that way when I'm watching it. One of the earliest non-horror Stephen King adaptations (if not the first?) tells the story of four boys on a walkabout to see a dead body and is bolstered by four of the best kid performances ever captured on screen by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell. Reiner's ability to work with his young actors and get them to absolutely live inside these characters is practically unparalleled, and while some of the dialogue falls victim to late '50s Stephen King speak, there really isn't a false moment to be found. It's a movie about friendship, about growing up, about death, about finding yourself. Reiner himself has declared it his favorite of everything he has made and it's easy to understand why. It's perfect.

The Bucket List (2007)

I was positive I had seen The Bucket List -- Reiner's last hugely successful theatrical feature and the the last movie made by one of my favorite actors, Jack Nicholson -- back when it came out in 2007. Watching it "again" for my Rob Reiner festival, I realized I had never seen it. Oops. I was mean about it for years based on the trailers, thinking it was basically a big-screen sitcom about old people being funny, and I was also wrong about that. Sort of. I was with this movie for the first half, in which Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play men from different walks of life both facing terminal cancer diagnoses together. I thought it was interesting and empathetic look at how we choose to live and how we choose to die played by two very good actors. Then the characters start living out their "bucket lists" (the stuff they want to do before they pass) and the movie turns into the broad comic bullshit I was worried it might be in which we are supposed to laugh because old men are skydiving and driving race cars. There's sloppy CG and green screen work and gratuitous travelouging and even more gratutious monologuing and it all feels like Rob Reiner pandering to an audience to whom he had not pandered to before. It means well, but it's mostly bullshit.

Misery (1990)

I didn't want my festival to end on a bum note, so I kept it going to revisit Misery, Rob Reiner's second Stephen King adaptation and his first and only foray into the horror/thriller genre. On its face, this is probably Reiner's best purely directed film. That's because it's his homage to Alfred Hitchcock and his most show-offy effort (in a good way), demonstrating a technical excellence and proficiency with visual storytelling not seen in his other works. You know the story by now: James Caan (reportedly the last choice for Paul Sheldon after the rest of Hollywood turned it down) plays a famous novelist who is in a bad car accident and rescued by his Number One Fan (Kathy Bates in her Oscar-winning and career-making role), who essentially kidnaps the bedridden writer and forces him to rewrite his latest book. The film has been somewhat robbed of the power it had in 1990 because Kathy Bates is no longer an unknown quantity the way she was back then. It doesn't make her performance any less special -- if she didn't exist, Rob Reiner would have had to invent her to play Annie Wilkes -- but the holy-shit-unpredictability I remember from seeing this in theaters has lessened with time. Again, it doesn't make the movie any weaker; it remains one of Reiner's best from a decade-long run of bests and suggests he could have directed just about any kind of movie at this point in his career.

The Story of Us (1999)

This movie meant a lot to Erika and me before it ever came out. It was late 1999, we were falling in love, we saw the trailer before every movie that played that year (and we saw every movie that played that year), and finally seeing it together when it was released was a big deal for us. It did not live up to our inflated expectations. Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis play a married couple looking back at their relationship as they head towards a breakup. This is Rob Reiner by way o f James L. Brooks, an on paper Reiner seems like the guy to direct this kind of romantic comedy drama at this point in his career. The whole movie smacks of prestige project, from the superstar leads to the supporting bench to the screenplay co-written by Alan Zweibel to the music by Eric Clapton. Somehow it doesn't all work: the comedy is too broad and sitcom-y, constant fighting too unpleasant, the martial observations cliched and obvious. And, yet, the movie worked more for me after 25 years together with Erika than it did in '99 when we were just starting out -- not because I relate to the couple constantly bickering and splitting up, but because the movie does attempt to acknowledge that grown up life is hard. 1999 was such a good movie year that even the movies that don't work have merit, and The Story of Us still has merit. It's another stumble from Reiner who basically only stumbled from here on out, but it does have some merit.

This is Spinal Tap (1984)

In the spirit of doing things completely wrong, let's end the festival with Rob Reiner's first film, still the greatest mockumentary ever made and the movie that announced him as a director demanding our attention. It would be easy to say that Reiner just put Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean in a movie as their fictional alter egos as the washed-up metal band Spinal Tap and then got out of their way, but that would be discounting his contributions to the film, one of the best comedies of the 1980s. This is Spinal Tap has become so referenced and quoted in popular culture that it can feel overly familiar, like the lyrics to "Happy Birthday," but it's just so, so smart and funny, brilliantly walking the fine line between stupid and clever. See what I mean? Constant references.

Can't wait to do it again next year! Whose movies should I run in 2025?