Rob Reiner directed many enduring American classics. “Stand by Me.” “This is Spinal Tap.” “The Princess Bride.”
He also directed “North.”
“North” was not a hit. It was not critically acclaimed. Three decades after its 1994 release, it may be the only film remembered mostly for a review.
“I hated this movie,” the critic Roger Ebert wrote. “Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie.”
While the movie and its reception was the first major misstep in Reiner’s directorial career, it also revealed his sense of humor about criticism of his own work. During a roast of Reiner at the Friars Club in 2000, he was asked to read from Ebert’s review in front of the audience. After gamely reading scathing excerpts, including the unequivocal “hated” line, Reiner quipped, “If you read between the lines, it’s not that bad!”
“North” came at a time when Reiner could seemingly do no wrong. His last five movies had earned Oscar nominations, including four for his most recent, “A Few Good Men.” They had resonated with the public, too: It seemed everyone was quoting the memorable lines from “This Is Spinal Tap” or imitating the fake-orgasm scene from “When Harry Met Sally …”
Then came “North.” With a heavyweight cast, it tells the story of a boy named North (Elijah Wood), who is unhappy with his parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander) and goes to court to “divorce” them. He then embarks on an odyssey to find new ones, guided by a mystical man (Bruce Willis) who keeps turning up on the way.
In North’s globe-trotting, each of the prospective parents are terrible in their own “comic” way. Texans try to make him morbidly obese by stuffing him with food. Hawaiians exploit him for a tourism campaign. Inuits (one played by Kathy Bates) plan to callously send granddad (Abe Vigoda!) on an ice floe to his death.
In the end — wait for it — it was all a dream. North decides, to the surprise of few, that there is no place like home after all.
Few people saw “North.” It earned just over $7 million, with an estimated budget of $40 million. Those who were paid to watch it did not enjoy its mix of sentiment, whimsy and one-dimensional cultural stereotypes.
Ebert went on in his review: “‘North’ is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails.” The review even contributed to the title of Ebert’s 2000 book, a compilation of negative reviews: “I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.”
“I know what went wrong with this movie,” said Gene Siskel, Ebert’s partner on their televised review show. “Everything.” Kenneth Turan said in The Los Angeles Times: “Besides being disappointing, which it certainly is, ‘North’ is baffling, a cause for sadness rather than anger. How could director Rob Reiner, whose touch for what pleases a mass audience is usually unfailing, have strayed this far?”
Reiner is far from the only celebrated director who misfired. “North” has a rating of 14, out of 100, from the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, with company including Steven Spielberg’s “Hook” (32), Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Wild Wild West” (16), Guy Ritchie’s “Swept Away” (6) and Barry Levinson’s “Toys” (26).
And not everyone “hated, hated, hated” “North.” In The New York Times, the critic Janet Maslin wrote that the film “doesn’t always work, but much of it is clever in amusingly unpredictable ways.” In the A.V. Club in 2007, the bad movie aficionado Nathan Rabin branded the film a “failure” but wrote: “I went in expecting one of the worst films ever made. I can’t say I was pleasantly surprised, but I wasn’t horrified either.”
Reiner was able to look back on “North” and its reception with humor. But he also defended it, suggesting critics had been looking for a different kind of film: “Roger Ebert wanted me to do something,” he told Screen Crush in 2014. “He wanted me to do something that I didn’t do for him. So, I wanted to make this little fable — this little kind of quirky fable about a boy who’s questioning if he could have different parents. That fantasy that kids have at all times. So, I liked that.”
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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