The present politics of Rob Reiner's 'A Few Good Men'

When you talk about the great winning streaks of certain American directors over the last half-century or so, you’re usually talking about major auteurs: Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now), Robert Altman (The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, Nashville), Walter Hill (Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs.), etc. In the wake of his tragic murder over the weekend, many have noted that Rob Reiner kicked off his career with quite a run of his own from 1984 to 1992: This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, and A Few Good Men. The streak ended with the enormous drop in cabin pressure that was the 1994 comedy North—though credit Reiner for shaking off Roger Ebert’s famous pan of that film—and his subsequent work rarely had the same magic. That happens to artists sometimes, too. Not all trajectories are the same. 

What’s striking about Reiner’s run is the Jack-of-all-genres variety of the films, which includes the definitive mockumentary (and one of the funniest movies ever made), an elevated ’80s sex comedy, a coming-of-age picture, a fractured storybook fantasy, a paradigmatic rom-com, a horror film, and a courtroom drama. There’s not much in the way of a stylistic signature or an overarching theme connecting these films, just reliable good taste and a rare ability to please audiences. That the Hollywood of 2025 doesn’t often produce many of the types of films that Reiner directed during that period has made his loss feel that much more acute, especially when you consider how much of the 21st century he’d spent in the filmmaking wilderness. Reiner at his best was like a versatile studio craftsman of the old school: When you  look at his prime, you can only shake your head and say, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.” 

Before Reiner’s death, current events had me thinking a lot about 1993’s A Few Good Men, a courtroom drama that would have felt like a shot across the bow to the Trump administration had Columbia Pictures kept it on the shelf for 32 years before releasing it. (And given Reiner’s prominence as a liberal activist, which inspired a shockingly graceless response from the president, he’d have probably relished the opportunity.) About a month ago, a group of lawmakers with military backgrounds, led by senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, released a video reminding service members of their obligation not to follow illegal orders from their superiors. The video enraged the administration, particularly the Pentagon under defense secretary Pete Hegseth, which has threatened to recall Kelly to active duty and subject him to court-martial proceedings. 

The background for all this real-world drama appears to be the continued Naval strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, particularly the scandal around the killing of two survivors that could potentially be a war crime. (Never mind that extrajudicial death-from-above isn’t the standard punishment for drug dealers, but I digress.) There are distinct echoes of the incident in A Few Good Men, which is about the murky business of following orders and how the top brass shields itself from accountability by exposing those further down the chain of command. It’s safe to say, for example, that Hegseth might sympathize with Col. Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson), the tough-as-nails base commander at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base who covers up his involvement in the murder of a Marine. And perhaps Admiral Frank "Mitch" Bradley, the man who executed the strikes on the survivors, might feel a connection to Lance Corporal Harold Dawson (Wolfgang Bodison) and Private First Class Louden Downey (James Marshall), the men who killed their fellow Marine. If you follow illegal orders, sometimes you get left out to dry.