Stand By Me: A Review

"Were the golden years ever really golden?" I wonder sometimes. When we think of the 50's in America, often an idyllic portrait akin to an episode of Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best comes to mind. When we watch the more realistically done movies portraying that time, like L.A. Confidential, The Majestic, Shawshank Redemption, and the Green Mile, the view we get is a good deal grayer. Stand By Me falls a bit more into this latter catagory although there is still a certain poignancy to it all that seems to find its way to a lot of the movies about that era.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the framepoint that the reader has already seen the work in question. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

The movie depicts a group of young boys on their summer vacation, who are about to enter junior high, and make a discovery that launches them on a journey of sorts. It's a "boys-who-are-up-to-no-good" sort of trip that has many of the best elements of such a traveling/adventure story: the laughing and joking around, the occasional danger or harrowing situation, arguing, bonding, self-discovery.

The narrator of the story is a young boy named Gordon (played by actor Wil Wheaton, who is called "Gordie" by his friends in the film) who lost his older brother, Denny, a short while ago. His parents are quiet, distant, and have yet to recover the loss of this son who clearly was more well liked than young Gordy is. Early in the film, his father chastizes him, asking why he doesn't have better friends the way his brother Denny used to. Gordie's best friend is Chris (played by River Phoenix), a boy whose family includes drunks and criminals. Chris acts tough because of the negative reputation his family brings him. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is another similar such kid; he acts tough because his father, a war veteran, seems to have snapped and at one point even punished the boy by holding his ear to the grill of a stove. Everyone in town seems to know this as well, and the discredit which follows him around has made him defensive when it comes to his father, and weary as a result of that. Rounding out their group is Vern, a pudgy boy, who is most often the butt of their jokes. He seems to follow them around because he might have been rejected from other groups before them. These four form something of a unit, and one gets the sense that they formed it as a means of survival by banding together in the face of the ostracization that is rained down on them.

The story starts with Gordie, Chris, and Teddy sitting in a treehouse playing cards. It's a scene worthy of a Rockwell picture, though the details give us a slightly courser view of things. The boys are smoking, talk in a very smart-alecky way, and curse a lot. "Thinking up new, and cruder ways to describe someone else's mother was always looked upon with high regard." Gordie recalls in his narration. Vern arrives, out of breath, and asks the boys if they want to see a dead body. And so the journey begins.

We all have experiences like this when we're young, I think. Times when we decide to go farther than we allowed by our parents, times when it's just us and friends with no supervision, and times when it feels like we might have gotten in a bit over our heads. One thing that seperates this journey from what one the average viewer might've had is that this one has something that's a little bit extraordinary at its end (a dead body that's as of yet undiscovered).

Around the same time that the boys are questing out, a second group is getting ready to do so. This one is led by the thuggish Ace (played by a younger Kiefer Sutherland). It is revealed from the beginning that Vern learned of the location of the body when he overheard two of Ace's cronies talking about it. The boys' plan to travel out to see the body developed when they thought that said cronies were just going to remain hush about the whole thing because of a crime they had committed at the time. Ace and his crew are a bit bigger and older than the young heroes of our story, and Ace himself, is clearly bad news; early in the story he steals a ballcap from Gordie (one given to him by his brother Denny when he was still alive); he bullies his underlings into going along to get the body despite thier apprehension from guilt; he causes a truck carrying a load of wood to crash onto the side of the road so he can win a race with his friends in their cars. This setsup a confrontation of sorts when the two groups converge on their goal.

Along the way, the boys break into a junkyard (and subsequently escape the owner's angry dog), swim across a swamp, camp alone in the woods, and outrun a train when they decide to use a long, high bridge over a gorge despite the fact that it affords them no place to allow the train to safely pass them until they reach the other side. The last two events in particular offer some importan moments. The boys not only talk and tell stories around their campfire during the camping scene, but also take turns staying awake to defend each other when they hear wolves howling in the forest (Chris reveals to Gordie earlier that he has hidden one of his father's guns in his pack). The train scene as well offers a little more than just a quick moment of excitement; Gordie more or less saves Vern's life when he helps him up from a stumble and forces the cowering kid to get moving when they see the train coming. He also pulls Vern out of the train's way at the last possible second when they reach the other side of the gorge.

All in all, however, it is the quiet conversations that stay with us the most in this journey of a movie. We learn that Chris is innocent of something everyone in town has blamed him for, but that he can't escape the accusations because of his and his family's reputation alone. Gordie confides that he knows his parents loved his brother more than him, and feels they wish he'd been the one to die instead. Chris and Gordie in particular form a special sort of bond during the course of the trip, if in fact there wasn't already one there to begin with. Despite the preconceptions about him, Chris understands that Gordie has a gift compared to the others in their group and at one point lets on that he feels it's all coming to an end soon: "You're smart, and you'll probably start hanging out with other, smarter kids soon when we start junior high. Me, Teddy, and Vern are idiots who'll just get relegated to shop class", he says to Gordie who responds, "No way, I'll take that class with you guys to be around you", "Then you're idiot who's throwing away a gift." It's an important conversation, and one that ends with Gordie doing his best to encourage Chris and reaffirm their friendship.

The climax to the story comes when the boys finally reach the corpse they'd been seeking. The best thing about the scene is that there aren't any cheap surprises put in to try and shock the audience. Gordie tells us simply that it wasn't a monster, wasn't anything gruesome, it was just what it was, a body that had ceased to live. Then comes Ace and his crew who threaten the boys to get out and let them have have the body (they want it because they believe it will make them look like heroes to the townsfolk). The boys stand up to their assailants despite being smaller and outnumbered by Ace and his gang. When Ace pulls a switchblade on Chris things look to get violent until Gordie fires off the gun Chris had hidden earlier and then points it at Ace. Ace tries to threaten, bluff, and even out-reason Gordie: "You gonna shoot us all kid?" he asks him, "No, Ace, just you." Gordie responds cooly. The look in his eyes is all else that's needed to make Ace see he's serious. Ace and his crew leave, and the boys decide to let an annonymous phone reveal the location of the body rather than try to take credit.

Walking back into town, the narration tells us that things felt different for them, and indeed we in the audience know that things have changed. The boys have certainly undergone some realizations about each other, and also about themselves. And two of them in particular have grown much closer and stronger in friendship. It is revealed that Vern and Teddy both ended up just as expected, doing somewhat simple jobs after graduation: Vern as a forklift operator after getting married, Teddy only after being rejected by the military and then serving jail time for some crimes. Chris on the other hand, went on to confound the exceed the low expectations for him, perservering with school and eventually becoming a lawyer. It's at this point I recall the conversation he has with Gordie about being left behind while the latter goes on to do bigger and better things. I can't help but think that it was because of the bond made by the two of them on their trip that the two were able to pull together and Chris was able to find the strength to become more. In many ways Gordie has saved him because of their talk. Then a much older Gordie reveals in revelation that Chris died many years in a stabbing shortly before the telling of the story, and we realize suddenly our narrator's reason to tell the whole story, as an ending for one of the characters has come.

The final words of the story are: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" I'm reminded of another quote, this one from All The King's Men. It went something like: "You go to your childhood friend because he sees your face as it was when it was young. Before it became what it was, before you became clever and wise..." The friends we make as children we can never quite have again, and it isn't just because of the years of shared history it takes to make, for even those we meet later in life and stay friends with for longer periods of time aren't quite the same. It has a lot to do with the quote I mentioned, with them seeing us when we're still young. They see us when we act silly, bold, flambouyant and childish as, of course, all kids are. But more importantly, they see us as vulnerable and scared and insecure in a way only a child can be.