By Roger Moore, McClatchy-Tribune News Service –
ORLANDO, Fla. — Rob Reiner’s been making movies long enough that he’s perfectly happy to own the through-line that connects them.
“All the romantic pictures that I’ve made all have basically the same theme,” he says. “I believe that women have a better understanding of emotional things than men do. And men run around like idiots until they figure out that the woman they should be with is right there in front of them.”
That theme reared its head early on, with 1985’s “The Sure Thing.” And in the ensuing decades, he’s trotted it out again and again, in “When Harry Met Sally,” in his last film, “Flipped” and in his latest, “The Magic of Belle Isle.” The newest is not so much a romance as a bitter-old-man-led-back-into the-light-by-women story, with romantic touches. It’s Reiner’s second stab in a row at a family-friendly film. And that’s because, at 65, Reiner is thinking a lot about mortality.
“I liked ‘Belle Isle’s’ similarities to ‘Bucket List,’” he says, referring to the 2007 dramedy that was his most recent big hit. “I did “Bucket List” back when I turned 60 … I thought of myself as a very young old person. It’s the beginning of old age, that moment when you realize ‘You’re not going to live forever. This is your one chance. Unless you’re Shirley MacLaine. So you’ve got to decide what’s important to you, now.’”
What’s been important to Reiner has been to return to themes he’s touched on in earlier films, and actors he’s worked with before. In “Belle Isle” Reiner’s “Bucket List” star Morgan Freeman plays an aged writer who, Reiner says, has “given up on life. He’s in a wheelchair, has lost his wife and figures he has nothing to live for. He’s stopped writing.”
Settled in to a summer cottage in upstate New York, the writer makes plans to drink himself to death over the summer. Then he meets an imaginative 9-year-old who might be a writer herself someday (Emma Fuhrmann).
“The emotional ballast of the movie is their relationship,” Reiner says.
“Magic” isn’t earning the best reviews of Reiner’s 30-year directing career — “Shamelessly schmaltzy and predictable from first moment to last,” The Hollywood Reporter called it, while adding that the film “nonetheless manages to conjure a certain spell.”
Like the critically praised “Flipped,” “Magic of Belle Isle” has “hard sell” written all over it, with its mix of children’s story and senior citizen appeal. “Movies like this, like ‘Flipped’ and like ‘The Bucket List,’ even, movies for people who grew up going to the theater to watch movies, and not text and play video games, have to stick around,” he says, for their audience to find them.
“It’s extremely frustrating when you feel you’ve done some of your best work, and the studio doesn’t know how to market it,” Reiner says, remembering the difficulties “Flipped” had. “When people come up to you and tell you how much they liked it, it takes a little of the sting out of it.”
He’s sending the script for his next picture, “You Belong to Me,” his first thriller since “Misery,” out to actors this month. What Reiner has found out, making both hits and box office flops, is that “when you get to a certain age, you realize it’s all about process. It’s not about results, although you want the results to be good, and you want people to see it. But making movies is about the DOING. After all, the whole experience of life is about the doing. Any time I get the chance to cast, go out and shoot a movie on location, it’s great.
“If I wake up in the morning and no new part of me aches, I’m a happy guy.”
