Stand By Me
**I also wrote about “Stand By Me” as part of Film for Thought’s “Ultimate Choice” blog on coming-of-age films here.
Death hangs over the events of “Stand By Me.” For Gordie as a kid, the death of his older brother Denny has cast a shadow over his family life. For Gordie as an adult, the death of his best friend, Christopher Chambers, is the reason he starts to write the story of the time they and two other friends, Teddy and Vern, went to go see a dead body. Now watching it, I can’t help but think of the death of River Phoenix. Like Christopher Chambers, the character he plays here, he was lost too soon, as he was finding his way out of his childhood, and turning into a success as an adult. Meanwhile, his co-stars- Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell- have all found their way through adulthood, although it’s interesting to see how each one’s career seemed to follow the trajectory of their characters in this movie. Not entirely, obviously, but of the three still alive, Wheaton (Gordie) has found the strongest footing as an adult actor, O’Connell (Vern) is present, but seems content in a life away from the spotlight, and Feldman (Teddy) remains a misfit. This might be one of the most accidentally autobiographical films we’ve ever seen out of a group of actors.
When I turned 40, I did a list of the 40 films that helped shape my first 40 years. One of the films I listed in that was “The Goonies,” which is also a coming-of-age story about a group of friends searching for a dead body. I still stand by its inclusion, as it was a greatly important film to me growing up, but as an adult, Rob Reiner’s “Stand By Me” means more to me. In adapting the novella, The Body, by Stephen King, Reiner and screenwriters Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans have turned it into a film about a key moment of childhood for these characters, the moment when mortality makes us grow up a little. When we come in close proximity to death as a kid, or even, a young adult, you are forever changed. You are not the same person on the other side of that moment, and just that much closer to adulthood. I had ample experience with this growing up- between 1989 and 1991, I lost three of my grandparents, and in 2000, my fourth one passed away, and I had a front row seat to it. This captures what death can do to a child in a way that doesn’t feel mawkish or maudlin, and looks at it through the eyes of a child as well as any filmmaker has done.
If it weren’t for other films in the remarkable run that Reiner had as a director from 1984 to 1992 (namely, “This is Spinal Tap,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally”), “Stand By Me” would stand clearly as his best film. (As much as I love “A Few Good Men,” it’s not in the same rarefied air as those are.) This is as delicate and thoughtful a film as anyone has ever made about youth, but done in a way that doesn’t rely on the tropes and cliches that a lot of coming-of-age films have codified over the years. Part of that is the nature of King’s story, how it’s treated as a memory piece and takes place in the summer, when school’s out, but there’s also an authenticity to the characters that a lot of teen movies just don’t have, and I have to imagine this was a personal story for Reiner, that he had something of himself he wanted to say in this movie. That affection for these characters, and the time and place he’s putting us in here, is constant every step of the way.
Set in King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, “Stand By Me” has Vern telling Gordie, Christopher and Teddy about something he overheard his older brother say about the body of Ray Bowers, a teen who went missing a week ago. His older brother knows where the body is, and Vern suggests that the four of them go see the body. Their original intention is to find the body, and get the perks of fame, but as they go through their journey, and encounter death in their own trip down the train tracks, the search for Ray Bowers becomes something else for the characters, and Gordie in particular. He’s had a rough summer, as he’s become invisible to his parents since the death of Denny (John Cusack, whom we see in flashbacks), his older brother; Gordie was always a black sheep, as his interests were not the same as his family valued in Denny- he’s a damn good writer, but it’s not the same as being a star football player like Denny was. I can’t help but feel a kinship with Gordie in that way, given my creative pursuits, and interest in writing about film, has always made me stand apart from the traditional lives of my cousins; I’ve just gone a different way through life, and when we see him, Gordie (played as an adult by Richard Dreyfuss), is having memories of his childhood as he reads about Christopher’s death in the paper. It’s time for him to tell their story.
As a film, there’s not a lot I can say about “Stand By Me” that wouldn’t be facile and trite compared to the emotional impact I find myself having after rewatching it. The way the film makes me feel is so much more important than anything the film does as a piece of craft. By this point, Reiner was a natural storyteller, and he and the writers have some great moments and asides that make the film’s brisk 89-minute running time feel like it should be longer. When you consider everything they manage to include in this film- flashbacks with Denny, an entire subplot with the older kids, led by Kiefer Sutherland, a train chase on a bridge, a story by Gordie about a fat kid getting revenge at a pie eating contest, and thoughtful scenes of revelation between the characters. Few movies of that length are as filled with story, and it’s one of the things that makes “Stand By Me” one of the great movies of its time- not many films accomplish so much in such a short period of time. That’s why so much of it sticks as we grow older, and look back on it like we do our own childhood. It’s hard not to get as winsome thinking about this as we do thinking of our own life. It’s worth the time to do so.
