Raised a Cain
By 
The story gets yet more depressing:
Rob Reiner’s son Nick was arrested on suspicion of murdering his parents after the Hollywood legend and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead at their Brentwood home Sunday.
Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said that officers responded to the Reiner home at about 3:40 p.m. Detectives from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division “worked throughout the night” and took Nick Reiner, 32, into custody.
“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of the Reiners,” McDonnell said during a news conference Monday. “A tragic incident.”
Just an awful story.
Friend of the Blog Glenn Kenny has a wonderful tribute:
His regular-guy demeanor notwithstanding, Reiner had a good deal of ambition, and the talent to back it up. He never gave up acting, and was a welcome presence in films by luminaries including Danny DeVito, Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, Mike Nichols and Martin Scorsese. But he made an even bigger mark as a director. Had he never done anything else in pictures, his co-creation of the fake rock band Spinal Tap for 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap would assure his place in the cinematic comedy pantheon. (Just the other day and for no reason I found myself watching the Tap video “Hellhole” on my iPhone; that line “I’m flashing back into my pan” never fails to crack me up.)
But Reiner’s whole first decade as a filmmaker was nothing less than startling. With 1985’s The Sure Thing, he and actor John Cusack helped the teen comedy grow up. (Keeping things in the family, the movie was co-produced by Happy Days legend Henry Winkler.) Stand By Me remains a supernaturally moving coming of age drama/comedy. He redefined the romantic comedy twice, first with The Princess Bride and then with the immortal, Nora Ephron-penned When Harry Met Sally. Misery, his second Stephen King adaptation, made the stalker-fan, in the person of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes, into a meme. A Few Good Men generated a meme of its own and remains a late-career high for Jack Nicholson. As a former actor himself, Reiner’s way with performers was hard to beat.
And then along came North. A movie featuring Bruce Willis in a bunny suit. On the one hand, it was Scarlett Johannson’s film debut. (She was nine!) On the other, it inspired critic Roger Ebert to concoct the phrase “I hated, hated, hated this movie.” While I wouldn’t recommend this as part of a home Reiner retrospective, it can’t be dismissed as an entirely unrepresentative work. I’d reckon Reiner’s attraction to this globe-trotting fable in celebration of the family stemmed from Reiner’s own kindness, which suffuses all of his work. While his humor could be pointed, it was never mean. Even when, in Spinal Tap, you laugh at Nigel Tufnel’s nonsensical insistence about his custom amplifier going “to eleven,” you also have to admire the guy’s enthusiasm.
Reiner put his money where his mouth was with respect to his politics, which were progressive. His hatred of bigotry was one of the signal features of his not-entirely-successful civil rights drama Ghosts of Mississippi, in which James Woods gives the second scariest performance in the Reiner oeuvre as white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith (the first scariest character in Reiner is Kathy Bates’ Annie in Misery, of course). In the 21st century, his film work toggled from borderline ghastly (the misbegotten scenes-from-a-marriage The Story of Us) to cute (Rumor Has It, starring the ever-winsome Jennifer Aniston) to biting-off-more-than-it-could-chew (the Woody Harrelson-starring biopic LBJ, which could have used a little Oliver Stone). But his activism almost always got results, addressing issues from gay marriage to universal pre-school and meeting with substantial and (yes) spectacular success in his home state of California.
Beyond all that he was a pretty nice guy. At a press lunch for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, in which Reiner plays the father of Leonardo Di Caprio’s hotshot criminal financier Jordan Belfort, I was seated at a table with him and actress Cristin Milioti, who plays Belfort’s first wife. His own formidable career notwithstanding, he was a little starstruck at having been directed by Scorsese. And also delighted that Scorsese encouraged so much improvisation in the movie; it seemed he hadn’t worked that muscle in a while. (Of course he would work it again in this year’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which he directed and in which he again plays director Marty Dibergi, the character whose name was concocted in partial tribute to a guy who made a movie called The Last Waltz. Hmm.) Throughout the lunch he regaled us with showbiz tales but was also kind and deferential to Milioti, the new kid in show business. It was a great time.
I plan on watching the Spinal Tap sequel this week, but his cameo in the Wolf of Wall Street showed that his comic gifts as an actor were undiminished: