While the other Remembering Rob Reiner series I'm doing in 2026 has been straightforward in terms of both content and order, I've been playing havoc with the content and order of this version.
First it was excluding my actual favorite Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap, from the series, because I watched it a few weeks before the series started in conjunction with Spinal Tap: The End Continues. That left this series to feature favorites two through seven, watched chronologically.
Then it was having to drop the intended chronological approach when I couldn't get my hands on The Sure Thing in February. Still haven't gotten my hands on it. I have until December to figure that one out. So I shifted to the order I rank these favorites on Flickchart, meaning I started with my #2 Reiner film, The Princess Bride.
The last two changes have both come since the most recent iteration of this series in June, when I watched Stand by Me.
The first of those was deciding to break the sequence of Flickchart ranking by not watching Misery next. I decided Misery was a better fit for the month of October, being Reiner's only horror movie. So I'd watch The Story of Us in August instead.
And finally it was deciding not to watch The Story of Us at all. That's no shade on that movie, which I like more every time I see it. It's that I just watched it in February of 2025, and wrote two different posts about it. In fact I've already tagged that movie six times on my blog, more than The Princess Bride (four) and the same number of times as When Harry Met Sally (which I watched in April). I decided I don't need another viewing and a fresh set of observations about The Story of Us only 18 months later.
That left me what is now my eighth favorite Rob Reiner movie, and one I haven't rewatched in ages, The American President. (I wasn't sure I'd ever rewatched it, but my records show it as a movie I've seen more than once, so I guess I have to go with that.) And in fact it's the last Reiner movie that I would say I have strong positive feelings about, before you get into stuff like A Few Good Men, which I respect but which has only a middling impact on me.
So just so you understand the schedule:
The American President - now
Misery - October
The Sure Thing - December (if I can find it)
Caught up?
For the record, The American President is my #698 on Flickchart. So clearly a film I like, but not one I would describe as a personal favorite. At the time it came out in 1995, it was a great bounceback for Reiner from the 1994 disaster North, which ended one of the greatest imperial periods (to borrow the pop chart term) for any director in Hollywood history.
Reiner decided he needed to get back on track with something Capra-esque. Not only is the word "Capra-esque" used in the movie to describe Sydney Ellen Wade's first arrival at the White House -- when Wendy Malick's character tells Sydney the security guard won't know what the word means, and he corrects her by instantly name-dropping several Capra films -- but Frank Capra III, who would appear to be the grandson of the original Frank Capra, serves as a first AD on this film. (This is why it's good to pay attention to closing credits.) Though to be fair, Capra III actually worked with Reiner on each of his nine films from A Few Good Men in 1992 to Flipped in 2010.
It was interesting to watch this film in relation to Dave, an even more Capra-esque film, if we're going only on an outsider's experience in Washington (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). I think of Dave and The American President as of a piece, knowing of course that I like Dave a lot better (currently #86 on my Flickchart). I watched Dave as a way of celebrating Joe Biden's presidential victory in 2020, confirming how much I loved it. My rewatch of The American President confirms that the gap between the movies is a bit greater than I thought.
I did enjoy my American President viewing, but I was definitely conscious of Reiner's political leanings as I watched it. See the thing that this movie does that Dave doesn't do is it uses the D word and the R word. Michael Douglas' Andrew Shepherd is a president from the Democratic party, and his most vocal critic, and potential challenger in an upcoming election, is the very Republican senator Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss. The internet tells me Rumson is meant to be an amalgam of well-known Republican figures, though he looks most like Dick Cheney, which is interesting because Dreyfuss actually played Dick Cheney in Oliver Stone's W. Certainly Rumson is meant to exceed Cheney in his ability to give rousing speeches.
Of course Shepherd being a good guy and Rumson being a bad guy aligns with my own perspective on the world. Democrats are my heroes, generally speaking, and Republicans are my villains, generally speaking. There are some exceptions.
But on this viewing I did feel a bit put off by it on behalf of conservatives -- just a bit. Although I do appreciate Reiner wearing his heart on his sleeve and leaving no ambiguity about his political affiliations, I also subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that a movie should be made with enough finesse that any viewer can see themselves in the protagonist. I can imagine that Republicans who might have been inclined to see The American President in 1995 would have been turned off by having their world view aligned with that of the villain, in no uncertain terms.
I think this might have bothered my wife more than it bothered me. When she asked how I'd spent the late afternoon on Saturday, when she was out for drinks with some of her friends, she was surprised to hear the answer, mostly because she doesn't know I've been watching Rob Reiner movies in 2026. (She doesn't need to be briefed on all this, and in fact, it's probably for the better that she isn't.) She then told me that she had actively disliked The American President, and she described its talky earnestness as one of the reasons, though I think she might have also hinted at its political stridency being an issue as well. (She's also coming at this from the perspective of making movies for all audiences. She's even more of a lefty than I am.)
So let's look at that talkiness. This movie is of course written by Aaron Sorkin, and you hear it in every single line of dialogue. This film was a prelude of sorts to Sorkin's The West Wing, which ran from 1999 to 2006 and also featured Martin Sheen -- though this time as the president, not the president's chief of staff.
There are benefits and drawbacks to the Sorkin approach. I think it works like gangbusters in The Social Network, in part because that film just feels so propulsive, when you take into consideration David Fincher's directing style and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score. It doesn't not work in The American President, which might be considered one of the progenitors of Sorkin's walk-and-talk style. But there was one particular part where I noticed one of these drawbacks.
Annette Bening's Sydney finds herself in a moment of intense emotion when she wants to convey how important the president has become to her, and she asks him not to say anything until she's finished, because she's going to stumble through it. Then she proceeds to make a statement that lasts no longer than 15 seconds and expresses a relatively uncomplicated thought without even a hesitation.
Simply put, Sorkin is incapable of writing someone stumbling through a line of dialogue. Of course, a director can do what they want with his words, and Reiner could have directed Bening to stumble during that speech. But given the sort of co-auteur status of Sorkin in a typical project, I'm sure Reiner did not want to counter his style in that way, even if this was relatively early in Sorkin's career and level of influence. (I'll just mention that the pair also worked together on A Few Good Men.)
The Sorkin approach suffuses this movie and ultimately starts to erode some of our good will toward it. I think it's more a Sorkin movie than a Reiner movie, which doesn't mean it's bad, it just means it doesn't provide for me what I like most about a Reiner movie: its sense of human-scale warmth. That's at least the case in the three Reiner movies I've rewatched so far this year, but will naturally exit stage left in Misery.
This is starting to run long, but I did want to close out with some clear praise for the movie.
I continue to love the idea of a widower president trying to figure out how to have a romantic life while being in office. There are a lot of really charming occurrences related to this, to match the charm brought to this project by both Douglas and Bening. Presidential logistics take center stage here, and I always enjoyed seeing them in action.
One thing I found funny, though, was the notion that a president would lose more than 20 points on his approval rating just because he started a relationship with someone. There's a lot of talk about morality in this movie, and it doesn't seem to relate to the fact that the lobbyist is trying to get his buy-in on a bill while also sleeping with him. It relates more to the mere notion that he would be having a sexual relationship out of wedlock, while his 12-year-old daughter sleeps down the hallway. Maybe this was actually cause for scandal in 1995, and don't forget, this was before Monica Lewinsky. But a single president dating an adorable lobbyist, who make a very photogenic couple, causing a scandal that threatens his very reelection? Well that's just laughable in the age of Donald Trump.
As mentioned previously, I'll return to this series in October with Misery.
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