With the possible exception of John Hughes, it is difficult to think of a filmmaker who so thoroughly defined the texture, tone, and emotional vocabulary of the 1980s, and whose influence extended so cleanly into the decades beyond, as Rob Reiner. His tragic death this week, alongside his wife, marks not just the loss of a prolific director, but of a sensibility Hollywood no longer seems capable of producing.
Like many viewers of my generation, I had my first encounter with Reiner in The Princess Bride, which I watched obsessively as a 12-year-old. It is a film I loved then and have returned to often, discovering new layers of appreciation with each viewing. What endures is its sincerity. The film is unabashedly heartfelt and quietly moral, with “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” yet never lapses into preachiness. It is earnest without being naive, uplifting without being saccharine, and confident enough to believe that goodness, courage, and love are worth taking seriously.
These are qualities Hollywood has largely abandoned in favor of snarky cynicism and self-aware detachment, films that congratulate themselves for not caring and leave audiences feeling cold and vaguely embarrassed for having expected more. Watching The Princess Bride feels like a portal to a time when filmmakers trusted viewers to respond to sincerity rather than recoil from it.
What ultimately distinguishes Reiner, however, is not merely his ability to direct a great film, but his almost preternatural versatility. Across the 1980s, his chameleon-like facility with genre rivals that of David Bowie’s musical shapeshifting. Few directors have ever moved so confidently and successfully between radically different modes of storytelling.
Consider the astonishing run Reiner assembled in less than a decade:
- This Is Spinal Tap (1984) — mockumentary
- The Sure Thing (1985) — romantic comedy
- Stand by Me (1986) — coming-of-age drama
- The Princess Bride (1987) — family fantasy
- When Harry Met Sally… (1989) — romantic comedy
- Misery (1990) — psychological horror
- A Few Good Men (1992) — courtroom drama
If there is a serious argument to be made that the 1980s represent the greatest modern decade for popular American cinema, Reiner’s fingerprints are all over it.
That generational run began with his 1984 debut feature, This Is Spinal Tap, the mockumentary that effectively invented a genre Hollywood has since driven into the ground. Without it, there are no Trailer Park Boys, no Borat, no The Office. Playing the fictional documentarian Marty DiBergi, Reiner follows the titular rock band on tour, capturing the peculiar delusions of grandeur endemic to rock stardom and giving the world indelible comic touchstones, none more enduring than “This amp is special … these go to eleven.”
Both buffoonish and disarmingly charming, the band feels uncannily authentic, its inflated egos worn with almost childlike sincerity. Spinal Tap was also remarkably ahead of its time, anticipating the aesthetics and rhythms of reality television long before the format saturated the airwaves. Among my favorite running gags is DiBergi’s deadpan inquiry into the band’s revolving door of drummers: one died in a “bizarre gardening accident;” another choked on vomit — “it was actually someone else’s vomit,” the band solemnly clarifies. Much of the film’s dialogue emerged from stream-of-consciousness improvisation, a testament not only to the cast’s instincts, but to Reiner’s deft hand as a director.
After the breezy college-set comedy The Sure Thing, the following year, Reiner delivered what may be the greatest coming-of-age film ever made: Stand by Me. Only a director who understood childhood as intimately as Reiner, who would go on to make the definitive childhood fantasy in The Princess Bride, could have captured adolescence with such emotional precision.
Based on a Stephen King novella, Stand by Me remains not only one of the finest adaptations of King’s work. King famously walked out of Reiner’s initial screening, only to return and declare it the best adaptation of his writing, but also one of cinema’s most profound rite-of-passage films. It depicts a time when friendships were the center of the universe and when loyalty and shared experience mattered more than anything. The quartet of child actors assembled here may be the finest ever put on screen, and Reiner captures their complicated but unbreakable bond with tenderness and honesty.
Reiner followed The Princess Bride with When Harry Met Sally, widely regarded as the gold standard of modern romantic comedies. The movie is framed around a deceptively simple question: Can men and women remain platonic friends? The film dissects romance, intimacy, and timing with intelligence and warmth, with Billy Crystal’s Harry Burns and Meg Ryan’s Sally Albright practically defining cinematic chemistry. The film gifted popular culture one of its most enduring punchlines: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Reiner suffuses the film with charm and texture: New York in autumn, tweed jackets, warm sweaters, and a soundtrack of velvety jazz standards. It is comfort incarnate; it is your favorite mug of hot chocolate, channeled as a movie.
Taken together, this run is almost absurd in its breadth: the definitive mockumentary, the quintessential coming-of-age story, a timeless family fantasy, the great romantic comedy, followed by Misery, another great Stephen King adaptation, and A Few Good Men, among the finest screenplays Aaron Sorkin would ever write. It is difficult to name another director whose first decade produced such an unbroken sequence of cultural landmarks.
TRUMP’S DERANGED STATEMENT GIVES ROB REINER THE LAST LAUGH
In his later years, Reiner became louder and more pugilistic, particularly in his political commentary. This tendency even earned him an unflattering South Park parody in 2003, which he reportedly took in good humor. But these controversies will fade. What will endure are the films: works of generosity, craft, and emotional clarity that remain embedded in our cultural backbone.
Rob Reiner believed in people. He believed in friendship, love, courage, and the possibility of decency without irony. And that belief may be his greatest legacy of all.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.