How Rob Reiner's Career Went South After 'North'

A mere five years separates 1989’s When Harry Met Sally… and 1994’s North, Rob Reiner’s fifth and eighth feature films respectively. But in terms of reception, enduring popularity and, most of all, quality, the two movies — which turn 25 and 20 this year — are practically a millennia apart. When Harry Met Sally… solidified the actor-turned-director as one of Hollywood’s original ’80s kings of comedy. But then North happened. If his pre-1994 filmography reads like a time capsule of treasured movies, almost every title post-1994 inspires a reaction more along the lines of: “Huh?” That’s definitely the response inspired by the trailers for Reiner’s latest, And So It Goes, which opens Friday. Starring Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas as a late-in-life odd couple, the movie appears to exist primarily so that grandparents will have something to watch while their grandkids are at Transformers: Age of Extinction. How did Reiner get here? Combing through his three-decade career, five movies stand out as key turning points that brought him to his current place of faded glory. Remember, these aren’t necessarily his best movies…just the ones that impacted him most, for good and for ill.

Stand By Me (1986)

Refresher: Four boys set out into the wilderness to see their very first dead body, hoping for a grand adventure, but coming home profoundly changed.

What Came Before: In the (very) beginning, Reiner followed his old man, Carl Reiner, into the family business of television, as a successful writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and even more successful actor as Mike on All in the Family. Being part of that ’70s comedy scene brought him into regular contact with the era’s funniest men and women, including folks like Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean who made their first collective appearance as the best fake metal band around, Spinal Tap, on a Reiner-led Saturday Night Live rip-off called The T.V. Show. So when Reiner decided to make the move into feature filmmaking, it’s only natural that he buddied up with those guys to make 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, an at-the-time overlooked debut that has since become a stone-cold classic. If audiences were left a bit befuddled by that movie’s mixture of fact and (mostly) fiction, they had no trouble latching onto Reiner’s follow-up, the solidly mainstream teen comedy The Sure Thing (1985).

What Changed: With two broad comedies under his belt, Reiner moved onto a piece of material that had plenty of big laughs, but also a pronounced measure of dramatic pathos. Because even though the “Lard Ass” sequence is probably the part of Stand By Me you and your buddies rewound over and over back in the day, it’s Wil Wheaton’s mournful isolation from his parents and Corey Feldman’s simmering rage that linger now, along with the muted, going-their-separate-ways conclusion. Stand By Me also forged two important connections that would shape Reiner’s career: the first to author Stephen King, who wrote the story on which the film is based (and whose favorite fictional setting, Castle Rock, Maine, became the name of the director’s production company) and the second to childhood itself, a subject and state of mind that Reiner would frequently revisit. Even in his later, lesser films, the director has an uncommonly good touch with child and teenage actors.

In His Own Words: He told the New York Times: “I would stand behind the camera and act nearly every scene out for them so they could hear what the part should sound like. That’s part of the benefits of being an actor myself. I didn’t want the kids to be acting. I had some trouble with Corey, who would say, ‘You’re not letting me act.’ And I would say, ‘This has to be real.’”

When Harry Met Sally… (1989)

Refresher: A man and a woman progress from enemies, to friends, to lovers over the course of 12 years.

What Came Before: Just a little movie called The Princess Bride (1987), the single most quotable film of all time if you’re age 30 and over. Despite Bride's longevity, it didn't exactly have a seismic impact upon its initial release, grossing $20 million less than Stand By Me, perhaps because it came across as kids’ stuff after the mature drama of its predecessor. Very good kids’ stuff mind you, but still kids’ stuff.

What Changed: Sure, the members of Spinal Tap were technically adults, but When Harry Met Sally… is for all intents and purposes Reiner’s first movie about actual grown-ups and their actual grown-up concerns — like love, marriage, and having someone to kiss on New Year’s Eve. Reiner has always been generous about crediting screenwriter Nora Ephron as being instrumental to the movie’s success and she did write a great script — one that’s sweet without being cloying and honest without being navel-gazing. At the same time, Reiner also brings a lot of his own experiences to the movie, which makes it feel more personal than the slew of rom-com imitators it inspired.

In His Own Words: He told The Daily Beast,"I think the reason why When Harry Met Sally… works is that there’s a lot of Nora in Sally. It was an idea I had based on the fact that I had been single for 10 years and making a mess of my single life, and started thinking about how men dated and whether sex gets in the way of a friendship. I started talking to Nora about it and she said, 'There’s definitely a film in this.' I knew I needed to have a woman’s voice, and I was lucky enough to pick the smartest, funniest woman on the planet.”

North (1994)

Refresher: Weary of being ignored by his harried parents, a precocious kid declares free agency and “interviews” with prospective new families, while his so-called friend plots a complete overthrow of the usual parent-child relationship.

What Came Before: Emboldened by the success of When Harry Met Sally…, Reiner felt ready to move into riskier territory, starting with his 1990 adaptation of the Stephen King thriller Misery. Oddly, his background in comedy is one of the reasons why that film works as well as it does; after all, the premise — an author is imprisoned by a super-fan and has to write the ultimate piece of fan-fiction to escape — is darkly hilarious and Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance often goes big and broad. But the laughter sticks in your throat as the writer’s situation gets increasingly desperate. After Misery, Reiner turned to very different material with the courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992). There’s humor in there as well courtesy of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, but for the most part it finds Reiner working in purely dramatic territory, without the safety net of regular punchlines.

What Changed: After those two risks paid off handsomely, Reiner had the confidence and clout he needed to take another big swing with North, a children’s fable with a screwball comedy edge. But from the very first scene, there’s something fundamentally off about the movie that the passage of time hasn’t fixed. Considering that the director got his start on a TV series that challenged prevailing racial and social stereotypes, North embraces them to an almost disturbing degree — whether it’s the large-living Texas couple who ply the titular kid with plates of ribs or the Eskimo family who appear to be living on the fanciful North Pole set Jon Favreau would later use for Elf. And the parallel storyline involving North’s buddy, who becomes a pint-sized despot, is painfully misconceived on just about every level, from casting to tone. This is the first instance where Reiner’s sharp comic instincts utterly failed him. The vitriol the movie encountered may seem hyperbolic in hindsight (including Roger Ebert’s now-infamous line, “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.”) But it really is that bad.

In His Own Words: He told a Florida newspaper,”What I responded to when I read the book [North] was a feeling that I had when I was 11 or 12 years old, feeling confused and questioning my relationship with my parents, wondering if there wasn’t something better. I wanted to separate myself from them, get away. Not that I don’t think every kid goes through this to some extent. I think you have to distance yourself from your parents to find out who you really are. Then, hopefully, you can come back and accept them.”

The American President (1995)

Refresher: Washington is thrown into a tizzy when the widowed President of the United States decides to strike up a new romance with a beautiful lobbyist.

What Came Before: See above.

What Changed: Reiner reunited with Sorkin for this White House-set rom-com that functioned as a modest career rejuvenator at the time, but today mainly plays like a showcase for some of the writer’s worst tendencies. (Among them: female characters who are smart in their professional lives, but ditzy when it comes to romance and interrupting the narrative flow for grandstanding monologues.) While the director choreographs the proceedings smoothly enough (the opening walk-and-talk is like a trial run for The West Wing), The American President was also the most cautious movie he’d made up to that point.

In His Own Words: He told the LA Times, “If the premise of When Harry Met Sally... was whether men and women can be friends,” he says, “the central question in this one is whether you can do the dirty job of being President and still remain a man.”

Flipped (2010)

Refresher: A younger (think eighth grade) Harry and Sally recount the story of their tentative steps towards love.

What Came Before: The American President was Reiner’s gateway into the “studio journeyman” phase of his career, first taking on the would-be prestige picture Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), a Civil Rights-era drama which was positioned as a major awards player, but came away with only two Oscar nods. That was followed by the star-powered marital tale, The Story of Us (1999), which could have been titled When Harry Married (and Almost Divorced) Sally. Then he was enlisted to turn Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson into the next Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in Alex & Emma (2003) — spoiler alert: it didn’t happen. When the producers of the Warner Bros.-backed The Graduate semi-sequel Rumor Has It (2005) decided original director, Ted Griffin, had to go a few weeks into production, they turned to Reiner to get it back on track. As a thank you, the WB gave Reiner the money to shoot a script he had fallen in love with, The Bucket List (2007), the Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman end-of-life dramedy that became his biggest hit in years.

What Changed: Warner Bros. also footed the bill for Flipped, another Reiner passion project, but when it came time to distribute the movie, the release plan started small and grew smaller when audiences failed to materialize during its try-out run. Although the film has its modest charms, moviegoers didn’t really miss much; it’s a deliberately small, self-contained movie that feels tailor-made for VOD and DVD rather than theaters. No doubt sensing which way the winds were blowing based on the way his movie was treated, Flipped marked Reiner’s last go-around with a major studio; his subsequent movies, The Magic of Belle Isle (2012) and And So It Goes (2014) — both of which are attempts to tap into that lucrative Bucket List market of films for the AARP crowd — have been funded and released by smaller companies. That’s right: These days, Reiner qualifies as an independent director.  

In His Own Words: He told the WGA site,”Generally speaking, there are fewer and fewer places for films about people in real situations with real feelings than there ever have been before. The fantastic, the superhero, the otherworldly are kind of taking over. You see less and less films of what real people go through on earth. I make films about human beings that live on earth. There’s less and less of that in general, rather than the specific genre of romantic comedy.”