Phthursday Musings: An Inconceivable Loss

It must have been third or fourth grade. That was a time when we could read, but in school they weren’t giving us anything more than short stories, right? And it’s long enough ago that I forgive myself for not having a razor sharp memory of what exactly it looked like to be in the room listening. Old enough to read, but young enough that we would still be read to in class.

The Princess Bride was read to us. At that time there was no movie, and I don’t think anybody thought there could be a movie. But I have this vague recollection that we learned toward the end of the book being read to us that there was actually going to be a movie. I feel like we were old enough to understand that movies were often based on books, but too young to have actually read any book that was the basis for a movie, or maybe just a non-animated movie.

I can’t tell you the details from having the book read, they’re all lost in the movie, but what I do remember is how the book was big and weird, how there were all kinds of extra pages that would be skipped that meticulously described what people were wearing, or something like that. We were made to understand that this was a highly unusual book, and I suppose that made it seem improbable that it could be corraled into a movie.

The movie landed in theaters when I was 10, almost 11, having just started sixth grade. I don’t know how old Fred Savage was supposed to be in the movie, but Fred was born in 1976 just like me, and in the movie he was like us, he was a kid old enough to read but young enough to be read to, old enough to know some things about the world and to fight about things, but young enough that we too would have accepted listening to Peter Falk read to us for hours on end.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Princess Bride. Let’s say somewhere around twelve. I don’t know where all these times were. In the theater? On Mom’s couch? As an adult when I’ve so rarely sat and watched movies I’ve seen before?

Yes, there are a lot of choice one-liners in the movie, and that’s just from Andre the Giant. But there are all of these other things too. I remember Inigo Montoya’s shadow swordplay while awaiting the arrival of the Dread Pirate Roberts. I remember how very long the roll down the hill was for Westley and Buttercup. I remember how fiendishly smart Humperdinck was until… he wasn’t.

If you plug “princess bride” in to the search engine, the quick facts make this claim:

Genres: Romance, Comedy, Children’s film, Fantasy, Adventure, Melodrama, Drama, Thriller, +2 more

That’s, you know, impossible. No movie can be all of that in 98 minutes. (The “+2 more” by the way are Teen, Family film, which makes it all even more impossible.)

No, it’s not Citizen Kane, it’s not Casablanca, it’s not The Godfather. It’s not on the AFI list of the 100 greatest movies ever made. It’s not what one might call “a serious film”.

It is in fact better than all of that. It is a story of tremendous imagination, and yet a film of impeccable detail and delivery. It is a madcap romp, but it is also dead serious.

It is a perfect movie, its greatness all the more poignant because of how and when it came out, and how the book was read to us, and… it just holds this singular place in my memory.

And it is not even my favorite Rob Reiner film.

I, alas, don’t have it in me to give This Is Spinal Tap the treatment it is due. I simply think it’s the greatest comedy ever made.

I admit that I don’t tend to think about movies the same way I think about music. I don’t do these little categorizations in my mind.

The thing is that when I consider the entire body of work, I can’t come to any other conclusion except that Rob Reiner was the greatest film director of my lifetime. All of the things he did add up to mean more to me than I can say of anyone else, and isn’t that one simple way of defining what it means to be the greatest?

Seriously, have you really stopped and thought about it this week? I haven’t even mentioned When Harry Met Sally yet. Misery. Stand By Me. A Few Good Men.

Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths, the apparent circumstances, it’s all such a terrible tragedy, and I really think we as a culture should be grieving together. He gave us so much and it’s right that we should be sad and we should not let anyone or anything interfere with that.

To me, among the gifts given us by Rob Reiner and the talented casts and crews he assembled are these: the ability - the need - to laugh at how absurd this world is; and also the ability - the need - to imagine something better that we can forge out of the absurdity.

I hope that with META-SPIEL I am able to, in small ways, redistribute those gifts.