![]() ![]() Against this background, these boys are thrashing out some of the weightiest matters of their days, with the deceptive simplicity of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, with occasional dollops of Penrod Jashber. These are also roles with enormous risks to them, but Reiner has seen that his cast stays honest and his movie marvelously restrained-except for one scene, staged to be as marvelously gross and unrestrained as a kid’s unfettered imagination can make it.Īpart from its heart-pounding action scene, involving a trestle bridge and a train, the film is a quiet, lyrical odyssey, which gains everything from its perfect, small-town, heavily forested Oregon surroundings (Dennis Washington did the film’s fine production design, Robert Leighton the notable editing, Thomas Del Ruth the cinematography, unprettified but lyrical). These four young actors (and, among the less differentiated roles of the older gang, Kiefer Sutherland) have a depth and understanding that makes each character soar and live for days after the film. Earnest and sweetly dim, he’s also outrageously lovable. What’s heartbreaking about the rage-filled, daredevil Teddy is how easily he can go in either direction.Ĭhunky Vern Tessio (Jerry O’Connell) is a compendium of all our fears as kids: the one who will invariably forget the secret password knock, who’s afraid of almost everything from heights to darks. Damaged and abused by his father, he still emulates the Normandy Beach heroics that distinguished and traumatized his dad. Teddy Duchamp (Corey Feldman) is, of all the boys, the one closest to the edge. Occasionally-only occasionally-the boys’ dialogue becomes a little too prescient Chris has a handle on a lot of home truths that sound more like an author than a character speaking.) maybe you’ll write about us,” Chris says, in one of the screenplay’s rare lapses. Campfire yarn-spinner now, Gordie will become the writer later on (“a great one. Gordie is still mourning the recent death of his superachieving older brother-as is his whole family. Wheaton makes Gordie’s “sensitivity” tangible, but not effete. Slight, neat Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton), Chris’ generous, adoring buddy, sees his friend’s real qualities too. With alcoholism and delinquency the major strains in his family, his view of his own future is blunted and sardonic we see him for the princeling he is. Slightly older than his buddies, he’s tough but a peacemaker, the one who acts instinctively in a crisis. Gangs invariably have a natural leader, but the screenwriters (who wrote the lovely, undervalued “Starman”) don’t tell us, they show us why Chris (River Phoenix) heads this one. ![]() “The body” may also mean this body of friends, four totally different, absolutely loyal kids whose strengths and weaknesses work together like one of those chairs you make with four interlocking hands. The four younger boys, determined that they will become the town’s heroes by finding the body, meld their alibis and set off to see their first dead person. Circumstances keep the older gang at bay. “The body” is what sets the boys on their adventure-actually, the breathless news that a pair from an older gang have spotted the body of a 12-year-old boy, missing since he went blueberrying in these dense Oregon woods. It really isn’t that kind of Stephen King story. What the movie may do is send readers back to some of King’s less celebrated, less cranked-out stories to see if they can possibly match up to this one (which was called “The Body”). It should not turn anyone away from “Stand By Me” to learn that it’s based on a novella by Stephen King, written with that acuity that feels like autobiography. ![]()
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