I would like to offer a few words in defense of North.

Most of the remembrances I’ve seen for Rob Reiner understandably laud the fact that he started his feature directorial career a string of winners, a few of them now consensus elevated to the tier reserved for classics. The enthusiastic surveys always end conspicuously with A Few Good Men, the 1992 military courtroom drama that snagged a Best Picture Oscar nomination, his sole personal recognition from the Academy. I’m sure plenty of people long to extend his streak of excellence to loop in The American President, the 1995 romantic comedy that represents arguably the last time an Aaron Sorkin script was approached with the proper joyfulness and shade of irreverence to undercut its pretensions. There’s just that pesky movie in between.

North was savaged by critics, most notoriously by Roger Ebert, who tested how many times he could use the word “hated” in a single review (Reiner at least had a sense of humor about it). With the caveat that I haven’t seen the film in a long time and I vaguely recall there is some comedy built problematically around stereotypes or at least cultural simplifications, I think North was a perfectly fine comedy that met its modest aspirations of being a light, loopy fable for kids. In a summer when studios tried to lure younger moviegoers with obnoxious, cynically assembled fare such as The Flintstones, Getting Even with Dad, and Baby’s Day Out, Reiner’s offering had a sense of gentle play that I welcomed. At a time when movies were already tilting towards nonstop crass commercial calculation, Reiner was still pursuing warmth in what he made.

Affection prevails in Reiner’s best work. In the likes of The Princess Bride and Stand By Me, Reiner’s appreciation for the material, his collaborators, and the audience he serves is almost palpable. He likes the misfit band at the center of This Is Spinal Tap and the long-simmering couple of When Harry Met Sally… I think he even has some sympathy for Annie Wilkes, the zealous reader of Misery who won Kathy Bates an Oscar. I genuinely believe that Reiner’s output across the nineteen-eighties and into the early nineteen-nineties stands as the foundational cinematic canon of Generation X. These were the titles that taught us that movies could be entertaining and yet have some added meaning nestled in their frames. I’m certain that just about everyone around my age has at least one Reiner-directed work that they can point to as the movie that taught them how to love movies.

Reiner signed his name to so much wonderful art, including his Emmy-winning performance on All in the Family and the other instances he would pop up unexpectedly to do a little deft acting in a cameo role. Even so, maybe his most valuable mark is the one left by his activism. The list of issues he took up was long, and he was generally on the correct side. His central role in getting California’s anti–gay marriage law overturned is probably the clearest examples of his tireless efforts changing others’ lives for the better. Part of the storyteller’s duty is to improve on reality. Reiner is one of the few who tried to accomplish this goal out in the actual world.