Comfortably Smug

Reiner was all about sorting through the complexity of parents and offspring and coming out okay on the other side.

He's the one who taught us how hard it was, but that we could get through it just as he did with his own famous father, with whom he had bonded over baseball.

He just couldn't enact the lesson with his own son."

At the dinner, we pushed back our chairs and stood up.

Rob looked at me.

He took my hand and clasped it.

Thank you, Steve.

Perhaps I imagined it, but in his eyes, I saw a pleading, an ask, not to conceal anything, more the opposite.

He wanted this story written in a way that willed the best outcome into being.

I clasped his hand back as he held my gaze, an extra twinkly plaintive second.

It was the last interaction we had.

I still feel my palm squeezed.

that business about he wanted the story written in a way that willed the best outcome into being.

That's what I'm talking about, you guys.

You know, that movie, like, that's what he was trying to do, to use the best and most familiar tool he had, moviemaking, to will that outcome into being.

And one does wonder, like, now, as the son is clearly on suicide watch and now facing a massive legal trial,

Will he be able to use Rob Reiner's fortune to defend himself with this very fancy lawyer against charges that he killed his own dad?

Did Rob and Michelle keep him in their will?

So many parents who have a drug-addled child will remove the child from the will and tell the child that for their own preservation.

And also the thought of...