Rob Reiner made so many classic movies — the ones we watch over and over, the ones we can't stop quoting, the ones that soundtrack our lives. That's why the world is in shock and grief today, at the horrific news of his death, as we mourn one of the most beloved Hollywood storytellers. But he'd still be a legend even after he quit after the first movie he directed: This Is Spinal Tap. For some of us it's still his peak masterpiece, one of the funniest comedies ever released, yet one that nobody else could have made. He was just starting out, but all his genius is right there in Spinal Tap. It sets the tone for everything he'd achieve in his entire career.
Reiner became a famous director by the end of the Eighties, but when he made Spinal Tap, he was just some has-been TV star from a Seventies sitcom trying to make a movie. Fame-wise, he was essentially a one-hit wonder past his prime, yet he turned that into a grand joke for Spinal Tap — the original Eighties audiences laughed at the mere sight of him, as if he were a stunt-casting gag in his own movie — since that encapsulates what the movie's about. It was a commercial dud, just a low-budget, improvisational comedy about a metal band lost in the Eighties, burned out on sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Nobody would have guessed it was the dawn of one of the all-time great Hollywood runs.
So it's fitting although tragic that his final movie turned out to be Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, from this September. He began and ended his career with these incredibly compassionate and funny portraits of these washed-up, delusional showbiz types, without ever making them the butt of the joke. That combination of wit and empathy defined Rob Reiner's work to the end. Right from the start, he was turning it up to 11.
Spinal Tap remains the funniest, truest, most emotionally honest movie ever made about pop music and the people who live for it. The enduring power of Spinal Tap is how it gets the emotional details of fandom so lovingly right — right from that opening gag where the roadies lift the giant skull. The movie respects that moment as a genuinely sacred ritual, hilarious and ridiculous as it is. It was hardly the first “mockumentary,” a comedy staple for decades, or even the first rock-mock-doc. (The Rutles' 1978 All You Need Is Cash, an obscurity at that point in those pre-VCR days, was the standard to beat, even though hardly anyone had seen it.) But nothing could touch it for comic or emotional realness. Compared to this movie, everything else was just an 18-inch Stonehenge replica.
It wouldn't work without Reiner's touch for the human details, or his onscreen presence as director Marty DiBergi. He's the gruff, credulous, unflappable glue guy who holds the whole thing together, as he interviews Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer. Just like his legendary dad, Carl Reiner, did with Mel Brooks in their classic comedy routines, Rob Reiner was the straight man brilliant at making everyone else funny. The classic moment where Guest's gum-chewing guitar hero Nigel Tufnel shows off his prized collection of guitars (“don't point!”) and boasts about the amps that go up to 11 — that moment soars only because Reiner takes him so seriously. Try to imagine anyone else pulling off that scene.
I saw Spinal Tap in a theater as a teenager in 1984 — there were about eight other kids in the theater, all serious metal kids. My friend and I saw it the first Saturday afternoon it came out, figuring it wouldn't survive long enough for a second weekend (which was basically true). It's the hardest I've ever laughed in any movie, except maybe pulp Fiction a decade later. We were the rare and lucky moviegoers who got to see this movie without knowing any of the jokes already. (On Monday, we went to school and ruined the movie for all our friends at lunch, riffing through every last joke, possibly the most popular moment I ever had in high school.)
Everybody laughed as soon as we saw Reiner in the opening scene, because we knew this guy — Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the wise-ass hippie son-in-law from the blockbuster 1970s sitcom All in the Family. It took a beat to sink in that he was playing a different role, a Hollywood hack. “I'm a filmmaker,” he told the camera. “I make a lot of commercials. That little dog that chases the covered wagon underneath the sink? That was mine!” (Chuck Wagon, it was called.) In his brief intro, he does all the world-building he needs to bring us into this movie's unique comic ecosystem. Even the way he called them “Tap” was a sign he knew enough to take the details of rock fandom seriously. “I jumped at the chance to make the documentary — the, if you will, 'rockumentary' — that you're about to see,” he says, smiling at his own dad jokes. “I wanted to capture the sights, the sounds, the smells of a hardworking rock band on the road … but hey, enough of my yakkin'.” Let's boogie, indeed.
Any paying customer who saw Spinal Tap back then — there weren't many of us — would have recognized him as Meathead. But this movie introduced the new adult Reiner — the gruff, bearded, genial mensch we all came to know well over the years. He was always a brilliant comic presence, elevating any movie where he showed up, especially as the screaming accountant in The Wolf of Wall Street (“What kind of hooker takes credit cards?”) or the cynical theater asshole in Bullets over Broadway (telling John Cusack, “You're racked with guilt”). “I'm cheap, on time, and I know my lines. I don't cause a director any grief,” he said in 2007. “I'm the perfect actor.” He was one of the few celebrity directors who revealed in the celebrity part, an Oscar Night red-carpet guest you looked forward to seeing every year, because this guy could give and take with Joan Rivers when most stars were (understandably) terrified of her. He once told her “You can't handle the truth,” which was brilliant.
It started with All in the Familythe most successful, famous, and influential sitcom of the 1970s. Reiner was a sensation in his cross-generational battles with his right-wing father-in-law Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), especially as he reluctantly grew to empathize with him. In one of the most famous — and most poignant — episodes, “Two's a Crowd,” he and Archie get locked up together overnight, and he finally hears the old man's horror stories about growing up poor in the Depression, going to school with one sock and one boot. The solemn way Reiner tells him “good night, Shoebooty” is a TV moment that could stick with you for life.
But it looked like he was destined to be forever identified with this one role. He sometimes admitted to feeling trapped by it. “Many times I've said I could win the Nobel Prize and they'd write 'Meathead wins the Nobel Prize,'” he said as late as 2007. “I'll never get past that.” But it turned out to be almost a footnote in his career as one of Hollywood's most beloved storytellers. And that career — in so many ways, his real career — begins with the Stonehenge and “Sex Farm” jokes of Spinal Tap.
It was as personal a statement as he ever made as a filmmaker. Like the guys in the band, Reiner was a fading star who wasn't so sure he had any future as an adult.
This really was his own “We hope you like our new direction” pivot point. When I watch the movie now, it always strikes me to see how young the guys in the band are. They're only in their late thirties, yet they already think of themselves as ancient and used up, after logging it out on the road so long. As with The Last Waltz, it's a movie about world-weary rock & rollers who think they've seen it all and can't believe they're still around to tell the tale — yet they're all basically kids who have no idea the hard work is just beginning. These are headbangers adrift in the early Eighties, when metal still seemed like a leftover Seventies trend, and there was no reason to think at all that metal would live on forever, as this movie did.
It's a rite of passage to discover Spinal Tap when you're a teenager, but it's a movie that stays with you for life, because it's really about midlife despair. It's a timeless tale of friends getting older, outgrowing one another, stuck in stale habits, resigned to lifelong diminishing returns, embarrassing one another's girlfriends, worried that they made dumb young decisions to play cool and will spend the rest of their lives paying for it by looking like clowns. It hits different with time, because as an adult, you watch it with a different perspective. Too much fucking perspective.
I saw Spinal Tap play live that summer, on their brief club tour, a Saturday-afternoon all-ages matinee gig at the Channel in Boston, a total dump that I usually went to for hardcore shows. I was surprised so many other kids showed up — waiting outside in the rain for the doors to open, we all sang “Big Bottom” together. The roof leaked, as always at the Channel, so the rain dripped onto the stage, and the sound kept screwing up. But they put on a hell of a show. “They told us Boston wasn't a big college town,” Nigel Tufnel said. “But your warm hearts make up for the low amplification.” The Tap opened with a snippet of the Fifties oldie “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” then turned it up to 11 with their anthems from the movie — “Sex Farm,” “Stonehenge,” “Heavy Duty,” “Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight” — plus their Sixties hit “Listen to the Flower People” as a reggae goof. They also kept fussing with their equipment, explaining, “The tuning isn't on the album, so you're actually getting a bargain.”
When I think about it now, it's hard to imagine how dismal this gig must have been for the actual band, playing to a bunch of kids in the middle of the afternoon. (They played again that evening for the over-21 crowd.) On some level, for them, this must have felt like Spinal Tap's puppet-show gig. But in a way, that's what the movie is all about.
Rob Reiner wasn't a musician, and not much of a rock & roller. (This is the only rock-adjacent movie he ever made.) But he was a Hollywood kid with a famous TV-star dad, so he grew up knowing all about showbiz failure. He saw plenty of it up close. Like a lot of Seventies comics, he was obsessed with the tragic figure of the Vegas cocktail-lounge singer, and when he hosted one of the first Saturday Night Live episodes, he pioneered the crooner routine that Bill Murray would brilliantly develop into Nick. So he understood Spinal Tap's dilemma on many different levels. That's how he was able to bring such a compassionate touch to the rock characters that Guest, McKean, and Shearer were devising. And that's why it was so touching to see him bring the band back together this year for Spinal Tap II, a sequel about the band's reunion. Like the original, it was both hilarious and touching.
Reiner's movies always hit home because he had that eye for intimate human ritual. There's this strange moment in The American President, from 1995, a movie I've seen more times than any Reiner film except Spinal Tap. President Michael Douglas is meeting with his staff in the Oval Office, and his press secretary (Anna DeVeare Smith) makes a callous joke about his wife's death, quipping, “We've never gone wrong parading you around as a lonely widower.” As soon as it slips out, she apologizes in horror. He handles it gracefully, everyone moves on, but after the meeting, as she steps outside his office, there's a close-up of her agonized face. She wonders if she should go back and apologize again; she wonders if maybe he'll forget about it; she wonders why she said it; she wonders if she's a failure as a human being. It's a private moment of her pain, just a second or two of Smith's closeup, then it never gets resolved or mentioned again.
It's weird how much I think about this moment. I can't think of any other movie scene quite like it. I still worry about her, 30 years after seeing this movie. It speaks to how acutely Reiner tuned in to the messy intricacies of human relationships. That's how classics like The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally … happen, of course — but that Reiner touch is already on full display in Spinal Tap. Farewell to one of the all-time greats.
