Wesley Morris Remembers Rob Reiner’s Movies

I’m Wesley Morris, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Rob Reiner this week, and I’ve been thinking about what his work has meant to me and to the culture. The meaningful, meaty handful of movies he made are extremely quotable. “Inconceivable.” “I’ll have what she’s having.” “You can’t handle the truth.” All lines that people like Nora Ephron and William Goldman and Aaron Sorkin wrote, but Rob Reiner brought them to life. Rob Reiner made one of your favorite movies. He made some movie you love and you’ve watched a hundred times. I’m not even joking about that number. A hundred. You’ve probably seen “Stand By Me.” Some of you “Stand By Me” people have seen that movie a lot of times. My “Stand By Me” is actually “Misery,” and it’s just about a man being trapped in a house by a woman who loves the man’s books, and she wants him to bring her favorite series back to life. There’s basically James Caan versus Kathy Bates. She is holding him hostage. It’s a dark movie, and yet the Rob Reiner part of it for me is just how much life and humanity is coursing through this psychopath that Kathy Bates is playing. I don’t even know if Kathy Bates would say she was playing a psychopath, because it feels to me like she was directed by Rob Reiner to play a person who loves art so much that she does not want the fantasy to end. There’s just so much humanity coming out of that woman. “I love you, Paul.” And when she was happy, you were happy for her. When she was in a bad mood, you were sad for her, and you wanted to make her feel better somehow. I don’t know, it’s such a wild thing to try to do, which is to get you to fall in love with somebody that you also were supposed to despise. But to me, that is the Rob Reiner movie experience in miniature, which is a belief in people and what people could be and could do even at the expense of your common sense. You just loved them irrationally, almost. I think that that’s Rob Reiner’s belief in people: that everybody deserves a little love.