Directed by Rob Reiner.
Starring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O'Connell, Corey Feldman, Kiefer Sutherland, Bradley Gregg, Casey Siemaszko, John Cusack, Gary Riley and Richard Dreyfuss.
SYNOPSIS:
Four young boys go looking for a dead body in late 50s America.
“I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being…”
The film’s melancholy first line, in voice over, echoes around the man onscreen. He sits in a car on an empty road reading the paper. It’s open on a story of a slain lawyer, shot dead in an attempt to break up a fight. It triggers that memory – a missing child, knocked down by a train, he and his friends had found in the woods. Not the corpse of his own, beloved brother who had died the year before, at whose funeral he did not cry.
The scene is a bookend. We return to this man at the very end of the film, but everything between is from his memory, narrated sparsely by his voiceover. His tells the story of their search for this missing child. The gang of four – Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell) – plot a trip to satisfy some morbid curiosity up in their treehouse. They’d overheard one of their brothers’ friends saying where they saw him. You tell your parents that you’re sleeping round mine, and I’ll tell mine I’m camping round yours. That sort of stuff. As they plan their deceptions, though, you get the sense they want to escape their homes anyway. Teddy has a disfigured ear where his father once held his head to a hot stove. Chris’ beats him. Gordie’s house has become a mausoleum to his deceased brother, his mother wondering in a mournful daze.
The whole journey, to see the dead child, becomes an obsession of Gordie’s. Thoughts and nightmares haunt him. It should have been Gordie who died, shouts his father in his darkest thoughts. And he never cried at the funeral. For the others, they have their own unconscious reasons, which never seemed to be fully resolved. Teddy’s ear, scolded by his institutionalised father, is a constant reminder of his disturbed upbringing. When the owner of the local junkyard calls his father a ‘loony’, Teddy unleashes a serious fury that is quite apart from his general mischief. “My father stormed the beaches at Normandy,” he screams over and over at the man through a wire fence, as though trying to convince himself as much as his tormentor. This is 1959, after all. These were the children of men broken by the Second World War.
It’s what Stand By Me does to perfection: tonal shifts between humour and sincerity. It helps that there isn’t a single dud performance, even from the supporting actors. The child cast are faultless throughout.
To reach the corpse, they follow the railroad through the countryside. The train tracks stretch out endlessly before them, an inevitable path to death. At one point, Teddy wants it. He roots himself in the middle of the tracks while a train plunders mercilessly toward him. It takes all of Chris’ might to drag him away.
A distance along the tracks, just of it in the woods, is their destination: the undiscovered corpse of a child. It is their fall from innocence. Things aren’t the same after they find him. They’re on the cusp of Junior High. They’ll drift apart.
And all the while, a slow instrumental of ‘Stand By Me’ ambles along with their journey. Although the lyrics are not sung until the credits, they still hum around the head, your memory accompanying the music with words. “No, I won’t be afraid. No, I won’t shed a tear. Just as long as you stand, stand by me.” And that’s what it’s about when you’re 12 going on 13 - those friends who are unshakably loyal because they don’t know any better. The world is yours because of it.
And you’ll never have any friends later on like the ones you had when you were twelve.
Jesus, does anyone?
RATING *****
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
Movie Review Archive
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