Stand By Me: On-This-Day Thursday
Every Thursday, an older film released on this opening weekend years ago will be reviewed. They can be classics, or simply popular films that happened to be released to the world on the same date.
For August 22nd, we are going to have a look at Stand By Me.
When Rob Reiner was first starting out as a director, he didn’t allow sentimentality to wash out the substance of all of his works (although he clearly always loved following the recipes of old on how to make accessible films). Toss in a dramatic Stephen King short story, and you’ve got a coming-of-age piece guaranteed to pull at your heartstrings. Well, that was always the intention. Maybe that’s what remains in the backs of many minds after audiences watched Stand by Me. However, it’s the verbal onslaught of rambling youths that left the biggest impact. Somehow, Stand by Me feels approachable, and not like a series of non sequiturs or meaningless spiels, even though much of what the four leading boys say doesn’t matter to the narrative. However, everything they go on (and on, and on) about is about life, and Stand by Me resonates as a slice of maturation that many of us vow to revisit, warts and all. Writers like Quentin Tarantino owe much of their character revelations through drivel to films like Stand by Me; arthouse movements like French New Wave are much more fitting, but Stand by Me was a mainstream film pulling this off in the United States. It’s kind of different.
To me, Stand by Me is like The Goonies but far (FAR) more likeable, and successful with what it aimed to pull off: the bottling up of the mischief of young kids discovering a bigger world out there. Maybe they don’t go after treasure in a different feeling world, but they do go looking for a dead body, and to these four boys that is enough. Their entire stories are dished out on the trek over, and it all stems from the lies they told their families in order to fulfil this quest. We learn about everyone: their insecurities, their passions, their dreams, and their torments. A subplot about older teenagers wanting to discover the corpse first gets thrown into the mix, and that creates tension; is this mission of these young friends all for nothing? Between the playing of chicken and other dares, the leads in Stand by Me feel invincible, which is ironic given their intentions on finding the first dead person they’ve ever seen up close. To us, this feels like a violation: let the dead rest. That kind of makes Stand by Me magical. We await the changing of perspectives caused by the very goal of the protagonists. They’ll get what they want, but maybe not in the way they expected.
Gordie, Chris, Vern and Teddy.
Despite the morbid core of Stand by Me, the film is full of innocence. The boys can swear and talk about sex all they want, but the truth is they are naive, and this story is them coming to grips that there is still much left to learn in life. Reiner’s obsession with cutesy cinema luckily provides Stand by Me with a bit of warmth when it could have been much colder, and this tenderness doesn’t get in the way too much. This was back when Reiner understood tonal balance a little bit better, and how specific moments call for certain moods (he lost this sense entirely in the ‘90s). Why is this important? It feels courteous to have some compassion for children who are clearly going through enough in their own individual lives, and are about to have a drastic realization once they reach this lifeless body they’re so adamant on seeing. The fact that the boys never really reconnect as a full unit of friends ever again is proof of this. It’s why Stand by Me is a film about childhood that so many people connect with. Sometimes, memories don’t have a clearcut feel, and Reiner’s adaptation of King’s words somewhat captures this fog; if not, the film’s at least not completely subsumed by specific feelings. Stand by Me is kind of about nothing, but it’s everything to the young souls we follow the entire time.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.