Annette Bening’s first time visiting the White House in The President and Miss Wade, Rob Reiner’s political comedy, tells the safety guard that he appears like he is in a Frank Capra film. The tribute to the director of How stunning it’s to reside!, Knight and not using a sword! y Juan Nobody It is not any coincidence: Capra embodies the hope of New Deal America, which emerged from the Great Depression with the injuries of poverty and rootlessness not absolutely healed, with the ghosts of the harvest vagabonds nonetheless searching for work on the roads of the United States. Although finest recognized for romantic comedies reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally, Reiner was additionally a terrific political filmmaker, a Frank Capra of the late twentieth century. Rewatching his movies whereas Donald Trump’s nonsense fills the headlines is an expertise as disturbing as it’s comforting.
Like the grasp of Hollywood’s golden age, he needed to painting the dignity of characters who imagine they’ll enhance the lives of their fellow residents, who select the proper path even when they pay a value for it. He portrays an America constructed on emigration and the combination of cultures, by which solidarity among the many weakest builds deep networks of protection towards the ability of the strongest.
Rob Reiner was murdered on December 14 alongside together with his spouse Michelle in circumstances so tragic that they’re tough to think about – every little thing signifies that the particular person accountable for the crime is his center son. Trump’s ruthless and undignified response to this patricide—the director was at all times very essential of his presidency—displays the abyss that exists between the conception of the nation that Reiner displays in his movies and the cruelty of the ICE raids towards migrants and the megalomania of the present White House.
Reiner directed a handful of movies about American historical past: In the shadow of Kennedy, about Lyndon B. Johnson; ghosts of the previous, on civil rights, reviled by the MAGA motion; both Revealing the reality, in regards to the Knight Ridder journalists who refused to swallow the lies with which the George W. Bush Administration justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003. These are movies which might be as attention-grabbing as they’re irregular, though they take care of the large points that proceed to fracture the nation: the reminiscence of slavery, social injustice, or the significance of a free press, able to standing as much as energy.
He was additionally the creator of two Caprian fables: the trial movie Some good males, by which he claims that nobody could be above justice and that nothing justifies the violence of the State – Jack Nicholson’s monologue is among the highlights of trial cinema of all time – and, naturally, The President and Miss Wade, the movie from which the collection got here The West Wing of the White House. Both had been written by Aaron Sorkin, completely recognizable for his or her dialogues that at all times stroll the wonderful line between brilliance and artificiality.
The President and Miss Wade tells the story of a widowed US president, Michael Douglas, who falls in love with a political marketing consultant, Annette Bening, inflicting a plummet within the polls. Douglas performs a democratic ruler, involved about arms management and local weather change, who orders an assault on the headquarters of the Libyan secret providers, however can not sleep due to the civilian casualties it can trigger. Both he and Bening imagine that politics is not only a matter of energy, however a approach to alleviate social injustices and look to the longer term.
His opponent is a Republican politician performed by Richard Dreyfus, ruthless, power-hungry, venomous and who doesn’t hesitate to resort to falsehoods to destroy his opponents. Michael Douglas defines his means of doing politics this fashion: “He just wants to scare citizens and tell them who they have to blame.” This phrase was written in 1995. Listened to in 2025, its lucidity and validity are spectacular.
Although Reiner’s most political movies are at all times two of his nice classics, The princess bride y rely on me (Stand by me). Apart from a narrative in regards to the energy of fiction within the face of a really early habit to screens – a toddler with a flu is dazed taking part in antediluvian video video games when his grandfather arrives and reads him a e book that may change his life -, The princess bride tells the story of an evil king who needs to begin a conflict underneath absurd pretexts: “We have been hired to start a war, a job that has a long and glorious tradition,” says Vizzini, the character in control of establishing the racket.
As Stephen King confessed in a ravishing article about Reiner in The New York Times, rely on me (Stand by me) is a movie primarily based on his childhood recollections: “I have written a lot of fiction, but The body It remains the only openly autobiographical story I have done. Those boys were my friends. We never walked along a train track to see a dead body, but we did other things. The story was about my reality, as I had experienced it on the dirt roads of southern Maine.” However, it is also the description of the United States before the great change of the sixties and the trauma of Vietnam (although the Korean War already appears in the story). The story becomes, in the end, the demand for a country in which everyone should have the right to a future and hope.
The child played by River Phoenix is condemned to marginality. He comes from a broken family, with problems with the law, and everyone believes—except his best friend—that he is doomed to end up in prison. In fact, when he steals money at school and then tries to return it, the teacher keeps the money and accuses him of being the thief, without mentioning his regret. “I never thought a teacher could do something like that. But no one was going to believe me,” says the boy. Only the narrator’s character, the alter ego of Stephen King, believe in him: “You can do whatever you want.” And certainly, he was in a position to research, get a level and grow to be a prosecutor. He would find yourself murdered, absurdly stabbed, whereas attempting to cease a struggle in a restaurant.
In these uncertain and dark times that engulf us, Rob Reiner’s cinema reminds us that another future is possible. David Remnick has just cited in an article about Trump’s authoritarian drift one of John F. Kennedy’s last speeches, given shortly before his assassination, which undoubtedly applies to the legacy of this great director. “In a democratic society, the artist’s most vital obligation is to stay true to himself. By serving his imaginative and prescient of fact, the artist finest serves his nation. And the nation that despises the mission of artwork invitations the destiny of Robert Frost’s journeyman, the destiny of ‘Having nothing to recollect with delight, and nothing to hope for in hope.'”
https://elpais.com/cultura/cine/2025-12-26/maraton-navideno-de-rob-reiner-como-antidoto-frente-al-autoritarismo-de-trump.html