’80s flick still a riveting trip back in time
In this occasional series we look back at our first pop-culture loves. Stand by Me came out 30 years ago this summer. Does this make you feel all nostalgic? It should. The movie has nostalgia built into its DNA, right down to its 1950s-era top-40 soundtrack, from Buddy Holly to the Coasters.
It begins, if you’ll recall, with Richard Dreyfuss as the all-grown-up Gordie Lachance, recalling wistfully his 12-year-old self and the day he and his three best friends in tiny Castle Rock, Ore., head off on a two-day trek to find the dead body of a boy their age who went missing.
The older Gordie narrates the tale with sappy fondness for this formative chapter in his life, which is forgivable, because what is nostalgia if not memories with the edges smoothed out?
I watched Stand by Me numerous times in the 1980s and ’90s, sharing space with Trading Places on a worn videocassette, but it had been more than two decades since I’d watched it, until I saw it again last week.
Which now puts me in Dreyfuss’s shoes, looking back on these scrawny preteen small-town boys whom I’d grown up with, then apart from. I’m caught in a nostalgia loop now.
To be honest, what I remembered most vividly about the movie was the infamous vomit scene.
Yes, the one with the big kid whom everyone calls “Lardass” who exacts revenge on all his tormentors at a pie-eating contest by barfing predigested pies on them. When my friends and I watched this, we would clutch our guts and fall to the floor in convulsive laughter — even on repeat viewings.
Today, the scene is not nearly as funny. And mostly it’s just gross. Though I can see why boys would like it. They like gross.
So that didn’t quite stand the test of time, but amazingly the rest of the movie does and then some. I expected it to feel dated, even slow. Quite the opposite: it’s refreshing, original, suspenseful and well-paced. It’s also blessed with some spectacular young actors, instantly likable and believable as four troubled friends with a shared obsession.
I can’t think of a film that better captures the awkward, feisty, cackling energy of preteen boys, never shying away from their best or worst qualities. They are impractical (forgetting to pack food for the journey), make bad decisions (entering a junkyard where a guard dog named Chopper lurks), fight constantly and swear like Eddie Murphy in Trading Places.
But what they lack in grace, they make up for in heart. Tears flow way more than you expect in a movie aimed at teen boys and you may find your eyes welling up right along with them.
Kids could easily relate to these boys, and I remember thinking about which one I most resembled (the skinny, nerdy, quietly strong Gordie) and which boys were most like my friends.
These aren’t any boys, either, but Wil Wheaton (Gordie), River Phoenix (Chris), Corey Feldman (Teddy) and Jerry O’Connell (Vern), plus a young Kiefer Sutherland as Ace, leader of the local thugs.
What’s eerie today is how closely the actors’ lives have mirrored the characters in the film:
Gordie is the smart and scrawny friend with the active imagination, who grows up to write a book about their adventure. The actor Wheaton grew up to be an unabashed geek (with cred from his days on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as himself on The Big Bang Theory), a master of social media and, yes, an author. He’s still the one I can relate to.
Vern is the chubby kid, mocked by his peers but who turns out fine and leads a normal, if undistinguished, life. Much like O’Connell, who grew to become a handsome, not at all fat actor, and has found steady but unremarkable work in Hollywood, peaking in 1996 with Jerry Maguire.
The character Chris is killed as an adult trying to intervene in a knife fight. The actor Phoenix was one of the best and most promising of his generation until he died in 1993 of a drug overdose. At age 16 in Stand by Me, he smoulders with so much intensity it’s still hard to believe he’s long gone.
And Teddy is the troubled friend, with an abusive father who tried to kill him, who grows up aimlessly. Feldman was a popular child actor, one of the “Two Coreys,” with a famously difficult transition to grownup-hood. (The other Corey, Torontobred Haim, died in 2010.) Feldman is back in the news this week alleging that he and Haim were among the targets of widespread child molestation in Hollywood.
So did starring in these intense roles seal each actor’s fate in some way, like a Stephen King curse? Or did Stand by Me have the most uncanny casting directors, with fortune-telling abilities?
Either way, it’s clear that Hollywood needs to take better care of its young — even when they stop being cute, even when their skills are no longer desired — so that it no longer hurts to look back on the movies we loved.
I can’t think of a film that better captures the awkward, feisty, cackling energy of preteen boys, never shying away from their best or worst qualities