{"id":471694,"date":"2025-12-26T00:14:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T00:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/471694\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T00:14:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T00:14:21","slug":"martin-scorseses-rob-reiner-essay-it-breaks-my-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/471694\/","title":{"rendered":"Martin Scorsese’s Rob Reiner Essay: ‘It Breaks My Heart’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMartin Scorsese<\/a> honored the late Reiners in an essay published in The New York Times<\/a>, writing, \u201cRob Reiner<\/a> was my friend, and so was Michele. From now on, I\u2019ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness. But there\u2019s no other choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Reiners, aged 78 and 70, were found dead<\/a> in their Brentwood home on Dec. 14 with knife wounds. Their 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder.<\/p>\n

\n\tScorsese first got to know Rob Reiner shortly after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he started going to get-togethers hosted by George Memmoli and filled with comedians and actors.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRob and I were both Eastern transplants, in a way,\u201d Scorsese wrote. Reiner came from show business royalty, his parents being the performers Carl and Estelle Reiner. \u201cThis was 100 percent New York humor, and it was in the air I breathed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRight away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room,\u201d Scorsese wrote. \u201cHe had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh. When they honored him at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean did a bit, which was a brilliant parody of solemn official tribute speeches. Before he got to the punchline, Rob laughed so hard you could hear it throughout the auditorium.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tScorsese\u2019s favorite film directed by Reiner is \u201cMisery,\u201d which he described as \u201ca very special film, beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan.\u201d And he wrote that \u201cThis Is Spinal Tap\u201d is \u201cin a class of its own \u2026 an immaculate creation.\u201d When Scorsese was casting his 2013 film \u201cThe Wolf of Wall Street,\u201d he \u201cimmediately thought of Rob\u201d to play the father of Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s Jordan Belfort.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe could improvise with the best, he was a master at comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: The man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew that he was destined for a fall,\u201d Scorsese wrote of Reiner. \u201cThere\u2019s that wonderful moment where Rob watches as Jon Favreau explains to Leo that he can get out relatively unscathed if he just walks away from his company before the S.E.C. has a chance to charge him with violations. The look on Rob\u2019s face, as he realizes that Leo is hesitating and that he ultimately won\u2019t stop, is so eloquent. \u2018You got all the money in the world,\u2019 he says. \u2018You need everybody else\u2019s money?\u2019 A loving father, mystified by his son.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tScorsese added, \u201cI was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved once again as we brought the scene together in the edit and moved as I watched the finished picture. Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob\u2019s performance in this and other scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filmmaker concluded his essay: \u201cWhat happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality. The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time. So, like all of their loved ones and their friends \u2014 and these were people with many, many friends \u2014 I have to be allowed to imagine them alive and well \u2026 and that one day, I\u2019ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself seated next to Rob, and I\u2019ll hear his laugh and see his beatific face and laugh at his stories and relish his natural comic timing, and feel lucky all over again to have him as a friend.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martin Scorsese honored the late Reiners in an essay published in The New York Times, writing, \u201cRob Reiner…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":471695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[171,83248,118515,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-471694","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-martin-scorsese","10":"tag-rob-reiner","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115782986345132322","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}