Rob Reiner Made Clear What He Believed In, Onscreen and Off

In films like “A Few Good Men,” the director’s ideas of honor and morality were stated as plainly as could be.

In the last scene of Rob Reiner’s 1992 courtroom drama “A Few Good Men,” two Marines, Dawson and Downey, have just been cleared of murder and conspiracy charges. They admitted involvement in the death of their fellow soldier, Willy, who died in a violent extrajudicial punishment that they say they conducted at the behest of their commanding officer. Despite that acquittal, they’ve been convicted of conduct unbecoming a Marine, and will be dishonorably discharged. Gobsmacked, Downey protests that their colonel has just admitted that he ordered them to do it. “What did we do wrong? We did nothing wrong!” he says.

“Yeah, we did,” says Dawson, with solemnity and shame in his eyes. “We were supposed to fight for people who couldn’t fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.”

He’s right, of course. And this recognition is bigger than any dishonorable discharge. “You don’t need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor,” the lawyer reminds Dawson as he leaves.

It is one of those thesis-stating moments that crops up in old-fashioned courtroom dramas, where the lesson of what we’ve watched is stated plainly, just in case we missed it. That can be handled clumsily — and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay for “A Few Good Men,” has turned out a few clunkers in his time — but in this movie it lands perfectly. It feels sincere and unforced. There’s little doubt in my mind that Reiner, who died with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, on Sunday, is the reason. As director, he makes the moment land, and he was known to work closely with writers on script revisions as well. But perhaps most importantly, the moment seems to encapsulate something key to who Reiner was: his lifelong drive to work for the causes he believed in.

Speaking to The New York Times ahead of the film’s release in 1992, Reiner said that the story presented “the same moral dilemma the Nazis dealt with at Nuremberg, or Calley at My Lai.” And it wasn’t just about military chains of command, either: “We’re all subordinate to somebody else. We all have to make decisions about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

From the beginning of his career, Reiner was associated with those thorny moral and ethical questions. He became a household name playing Michael Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the left-leaning son-in-law on Norman Lear’s sitcom “All in the Family.” The character’s altercations with his bigoted father-in-law, Archie Bunker, unpacked contemporary social issues and the generational divide, not always along simple black-and-white lines.

When he moved into directing films, Reiner proved himself versatile, able to pull off genre-defining mockumentary (“This Is Spinal Tap”), coming-of-age drama (“Stand By Me”), fantasy adventure (“The Princess Bride”), romantic comedy (“The Sure Thing” and “When Harry Met Sally…”) and psychological horror thriller (“Misery”) with equal aplomb. In 1987, he co-founded the independent production company Castle Rock Entertainment, which aimed to give filmmakers extraordinary creative freedom, whether their work earned or lost money. The results were remarkable, among them: Reiner’s own films, as well as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Before Sunrise,” “Michael Clayton” and even TV shows including “Seinfeld.”

As celebrated and successful as Reiner was as an artist, he was also an unusually effective activist. Unlike some in Hollywood who simply speak out on social media or wear a lapel pin for a cause, he invested time, resources and his own reputation in causes and built a track record of results.

All of this activism, on topics like same-sex marriage or the environment, made him a regular punching bag, both from conservatives and on “South Park,” where he was portrayed as a corpulent hypocrite. “Rob Reiner was just a great target,” the show’s co-creator Matt Stone said in an interview in 2006.

But he seemed undeterred, and some of his politics explicitly surfaced in his art. His 2017 drama “Shock and Awe” follows a group of Knight Ridder journalists investigating the rationale behind the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. A recent documentary that he produced, “God & Country,” explored the emergence of Christian nationalism in the United States and its ties to far-right politics.

Yet it’s really in movies like “A Few Good Men” that you can see his notion of what makes for real goodness shine through: not getting everything perfect, or fixing the world, but more simply standing up to powerful people who hurt the weak. Idealistic? Sure. But the same sentiment crops up again in another Reiner-Sorkin collaboration, “The American President,” which directly influenced Sorkin’s TV show “The West Wing.” In movies like “A Few Good Men” and “The American President” — even in a fantasy like “The Princess Bride” — Reiner’s sense of justice comes through clearly. Standing up for the little guy, whether it benefits you or not, is the most noble thing one can do.

That legacy of activism and standing up for others was mentioned often by friends and colleagues paying tribute to Reiner after news of his death. In an industry where it can feel increasingly rare to see talk matched by walk, Reiner stood out. You don’t need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor, after all.

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