Stand by Me was possibly my first favorite movie. I caught it on ABC one night when I was seven or eight, and quickly hinted to my mother that it might be pretty ok if I were to get it for my next birthday (which, if my memory is to be trusted, wasn’t far off). My mother was happy to oblige – unaware that the ABC cut and the full, theatrical version are two different animals; and one isn’t especially ideal for a seven or eight year-old. The ABC version is a fairly traditional cover of one of our favorite bits of hooey – the “one summer everything changed”. The theatrical version is the same hooey with an unusually high (for the genre) amount of profanity – unheard of in today’s insistence of ultimate PG-13 sanitation.
I wasn’t afraid to return to Stand by Me, which I hadn’t seen since I was thirteen or fourteen, because I just knew this thing would be terrible upon return – a dated collection of easy targets tailored to appeal to the sort of lonely boy that I most certainly was at seven or eight. And, yes, the movie is laughably rigged – a fantasy, which may strike one as an odd characterization, being that Stand by Me features a particularly nasty collection of older bullies and several off-screen deaths, but those tragedies reinforce the idealization– of unhappiness being diagnosable, easily recognized and corrected with cosmic, soft-focused nostalgia.
Stand by Me, as you probably recall, is based on a Stephen King short story called “The Body”, and it concerns four boys, all clearly identified as misfits, who go off on a two-day, twenty-mile trek to find the dead body of a boy who died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. We have our traditional types: The Misunderstood Leader (River Phoenix), The Pensive, Somewhat Unmanly Writer-in-Waiting (Wil Wheaton), the Clown (Corey Feldman), and the Clueless Fat Boy (Jerry O’Connell); and the majority of the picture is a remarkably earnest, pleading story of lost boys of all types finding solace in one another (in that regard, Stand by Me is more convincing than The Breakfast Club) – finding the guidance and understanding that their cruel, apathetic or clueless parents deny them.
It is nonsense – false and too easy in that way that so much early non-horror King is (King, until Hearts in Atlantis, tended to mistake “sentimental” for “mature”), but its not hard to see why so many people nurse fond memories of it: a. it plays to prejudices people have loved at least since the juvenile delinquent pictures of the 1930s, b. it is unusually well-acted by a few key actors, and c. the profanity and violence, while kind of odd for what is obviously otherwise a children’s picture, contribute an illusion of unruly disreputability instantly endearing to anyone lucky enough to get it by their parents. The profanity, including a few f-bombs, is awkward and pointless in the way that adolescent cussing is often awkward and pointless, and the filmmakers (director Rob Reiner, screenwriters Raynold Gideon and Bruce A. Evans) were smart enough to keep a few of the digressions that are usually trimmed from King’s material, including a story-within-a-story and a round of “mailbox baseball”.
The acting is the reason Stand by Me endures at all though, and by acting, I mean primarily River Phoenix. This might be the first Phoenix picture I’ve seen since his death (I might’ve re-watched Dogfight) and it’s a startling reminder of what the movies lost. Phoenix is playing a writer’s correction of himself, what a writer wishes he could be: he’s paternal, wise, handsome, athletic, and just the right amount of rebellious. Phoenix’s character is the bad boy a girl’s mother fantasizes about herself once they’ve left for the night (this aspect of Phoenix was tapped in A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon). This could, and should be, unendurable stereotype, except that Phoenix, who oozes intensity and sincerity through his pores, is incapable of seeing it as such. Wil Wheaton is (purposefully) not much of a presence in the movie, he’s our stand-in, but he has a rapport with Phoenix that contains truth: of that friendship that’s based on eighty percent admiration and twenty percent active resentment. There’s a lovely detail about half-way through the picture: of Phoenix winning a footrace that Wheaton began with a cheat. The way Phoenix wins – self-congratulation inseparably mixed with sibling adoration and perhaps just a bit of not-quite-understood physical attraction, makes the movie.
There isn’t much in Feldman or O’Connell’s performances, they are sort of likable, but they don’t redeem the types they are playing, and they both lack imagination. (Feldman was better in Gremlins and The Goonies, but he does have one bit here that rings true: his ridiculous proclamation as they all smoke over a campfire). But there is one other performance: Kiefer Sutherland as a surprisingly vicious bully (he’s leftover from King’s horror stories, and the character was indeed used several other times in King’s various Castle Rock novels). Sutherland is usually appealing, a little too eager to please, and, when it comes down to it, not all that memorable – but this role plays into a more calculating, wolfish side that upsets the tone in a fashion that benefits both the picture and the actor. The part is, once again, ludicrous: a sneering, psychopathic variation of the asshole most of us ducked in high school, but Sutherland, like Phoenix, makes it fly with conviction.
In general, Stand by Me is too enslaved to truths-that-are-anything-but, but there are a few touches that are admirably weird, and Reiner paces the picture just right (like an unexpectedly lovely summer day). The eight and thirty year-old Chucks could probably discuss this movie over a drink without getting too uncivil.
