Cillian Howley remembers film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner.
Legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife of 36 years, Michele, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on Sunday. Their son Nick has been arrested on suspicion of their murders. The tragic end to Reiner’s life is poetically unjust for a director who spent decades projecting hope, optimism and joy onscreen.
His impressive filmography boasts back-to-back hits in the eighties and nineties including The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. For the most part, Reiner did not write his movies - yet the stories he chose to depict share a common and recognisable spirit. In the worlds he created, love and friendship triumph and good always prevails over evil.
Reiner’s movies are often presented within unpretentious and straightforward boxes: romantic comedy, courtroom drama or thriller. These categories align with the star-driven popcorn flicks that dominated cinema thirty years ago. However, Reiner’s work displayed immense versatility and repeatedly subverted traditional genre conventions.
His directorial debut This is Spinal Tap pioneered mockumentary as a style of comedic storytelling. Four decades later, this very technique is omnipresent across film and television. Despite his immense success, Reiner was arguably underrated in his heyday. A decade of acclaimed, top-grossing pictures only garnered Reiner a single Oscar nomination – and for producing at that.
His 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally is the smartest of its kind. The characters are unusually introspective for a genre viewers have since grown to expect minimal substance from. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are deeply stubborn and often unlikable in their parts but maintain consistent chemistry throughout the film.
When... birthed the modern romcom as we know it and all its oft-replicated tropes as seen in My Best Friend’s Wedding, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Friends with Benefits. Writer Nora Ephron was inspired by conversations with a then-single Reiner to write the script. Harry and Sally were almost denied their happy ending before Reiner, inspired by meeting his wife, made the change.
Reiner consistently discovered and amplified great talent throughout his career. When... launched Ephron and Ryan to further romcom success with Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail in the nineties. Aaron Sorkin made his screenwriting debut adapting A Few Good Men. “You can’t handle the truth”, yelled by a career-best Jack Nicholson, is an iconic line in cinematic canon. The film is a story of the good fight against injustice that Reiner so often succeeded in telling. Sorkin and the now deceased Ephron alike, proved themselves among the most significant writers of the last thirty years.
In Stand by Me, based on Stephen King’s The Body, Reiner assembled perhaps the most talented group of fourteen years olds ever in Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell. In his second King adaptation, Reiner directed Kathy Bates to Oscar gold and household recognition with Misery. Reiner even cast his own mother, Estelle Reiner, to deliver the line “I’ll have what she’s having” upon Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in Kat’s Deli.
The hopeful worldview of his work in which love and morality are the tenets of society juxtaposes the real world around Reiner. Because of this, he has advocated for various social causes since the late nineties. The director has remained in staunch opposition of Trump’s views for the past decade. Once news broke on Sunday, Trump took to Truth Social to blame Reiner’s own actions and his apparent ‘TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME’ for his death.
Comparing his 1995 film The American President to the incumbent President of the United States quells any notions that the just world of Reiner’s work exists in today. In the film’s climax, Michael Douglas, as fictional POTUS, declares that “being president is entirely about character”. If only.