Stand By Me celebrates its 40th birthday, albeit in more sorrowful circumstances than it might, given the murder of director Rob Reiner last December. Revisiting the film, one realises that death is everywhere: somewhere in here is the disquieting idea that looking it in the eye - whether by staring down an express train or gazing upon a fallen schoolmate - has become an American way of life or rite of passage. This was one of an odd cluster of 1986 films in which young Americans happen across decaying body parts; the other two (Blue Velvet and River's Edge) were effectively fringe items, but Reiner, coming off the back of This is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, made his variation at the very heart of the Hollywood studio system. You sense the executives hoped the fresh-faced youthfulness of this cast (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell as its central quartet, plus John Cusack and Kiefer Sutherland in dispatches) might give the movie a leg up before audiences got to considering the sadness Stephen King, in his source novella "The Body", was actually writing about: the passage of time, and the passing of old friends and longstanding friendships with it. Finding the body of a contemporary is here positioned as a grand day out for four boys from the wrong side of the tracks, which would itself seem pretty sorrowful; it's made even more painful by a framing device that establishes Phoenix's Chris Chambers, generally regarded as the one of the quartet bright and scrappy enough to actually do something with his life, has perished in a random act of violence. Yes, there are vague similarities to the rock 'n' roll childhood of American Graffiti and the previous year's megahit Back to the Future - to some degree, this was also boomers revisiting their glory days to the sounds of their youth - but, deep down, Stand By Me sensed that, at some point, the fun stops. Hell: at some point, you stop.
What Reiner brought to the adaptation was, primarily, an appreciable and not inappropriate economy: Stand By Me goes deep in just 85 minutes. (Some films, like some lives, are too short.) Having apprenticed on television sitcom (All in the Family), he'd learnt to get what he needed without undue fuss, and shooting Tap had persuaded him not everything had to go up to eleven, that there remained artistic value in understatement. Maybe he knew certain sequences here - the rail bridge crossing, the bit with the junkyard dog, the pie-eating contest - would expand in the mind; their anecdotal, lived experience does come to assume a far greater significance in the movie's rear-view mirror. He knew, wisely, to set the kids' innocence against the unsparing horror of this American life: the shitty dads and broken homes, the poverty and the bullying. (Stray thought prompted by the lead-in to the pie-eating contest, a curious setpiece that is at once a nerd's revenge, an elaborate cutaway gag and the Carrie finale turned inside out: was the robust Reiner likewise mocked for his weight and eating habits?) One reason King and Reiner shaped up as among the current President's most vocal Hollywood critics: they grasped that nostalgia only covers so much ground, that - for many folks - America was never that great to begin with. Here, despite the deceptively leafy and sunny location work, the land of the free starts to seem as deadly for some kids as Korea or Vietnam. Reiner is as protective of his leads as any Hollywood director can be (for all the good it did two of them): there are very few of Back to the Future's eternally jarring tonal issues, he preserves Gordy's campfire confession that he misses his older brother (as the movie, too, seems to pine for Cusack), and in the boys' roughhousing, he sees at least a consolatory solidarity. But Stand By Me struck me this time around as more than ever a displaced war movie: a small squadron of lads dispatched on a critical, life-changing mission, facing up both to enemy combatants (older lads) and their own ever-growing sense of mortality. (Note the dogtag Feldman's Teddy wears around his neck, and the war stories he tells.) One way of approaching it on this anniversary rerelease: as Rob Reiner's own Platoon.
Stand By Me returns to cinemas nationwide from tomorrow.
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