Comfortably Smug

What could his father have done?

But Nick had no answer.

Not at a dinner, maybe not ever.

Maybe there was nothing Rob could do.

Maybe the whole movie, I thought, was Rob coming to terms with that inescapable fact.

And all the cheer and the pride, well-earned as it was, could simply not illuminate that darker, more severe reality.

Man, this is it.

He had done everything he could do to help his son.

He had even set in motion the Hollywood machine to help his son.

And yet there was nothing he could do to fully help his son.

Some things are beyond our greatest effort.

And they knew it at some level, Rob Reiner knew it and so did Nick and probably Michelle and Romy and Jake, the other brother too.

But even when you see these clips of them promoting that movie, some of which we played yesterday, they don't seem close.

There does seem to be a lot of damage between them.

They do seem almost like he writes to trying to will this into existence.

Like, this is our happy ending.

And the bit about using the Hollywood machine, which is, that's a tool that Rob Reiner was very familiar with, that he used all his life to bring stories to us, to bring healing to other people in some instances, like Stand By Me, and try to use it on his own family.

You know, like the power of putting something cathartic on the big screen.

He would help his son do that with his own story.

But he knew, I think he knew.