"But [Rob Reiner's] films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay."

So writes David Thompson in "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," read out loud on the New York Times "Daily" podcast today by the NYT critic Wesley Morris.

Morris uses that book to try to get to an honest assessment of the career of the recently murdered film director. I don't know if I'm getting the punctuation right, but from the transcript of the podcast, Thompson seems to have written:

"As a director, [Rob Reiner] seemed more struck — or poleaxed — by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled. He's carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting."

More interesting and, at times, far far more horrible. 

But Thompson's words are left to speak for themselves as Wesley Morris makes a quick turn to a happy ending. He says: 

I think the thing that made [Rob Reiner] lovable... as a human being, the reason he was so beloved by so many different people was that he really believed in the fundamental goodness of people, no matter what. You know, it's an impossible situation for a parent to turn your back on a child, and in the end he did not. And he didn't because, you know, those movies were this man — for better and for worse — but ultimately for better because they were about our better selves. This was a man who believed in life, he believed in people. And the movies stand as a testament to that belief, as far as I'm concerned. And when it clicked and for like I'd say 10 years, this man was humming. It really, really, really made people happy. The work that he made. And it's just that, you know, there's the family tragedy part, and then there is the, the happy guy part. He just seemed like such a joyful, like a beautiful big bear of a man and you just, he seemed like either he was gonna hug you or you could hug him. You were gonna hug him completely and he would be okay with that. His movies were like that too. For the most part. They were, they're always there to hug you....

And there it is, that notion — as Thompson put it — that niceness can save the world, that petty thought, that stifling of human and social realities, that pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled, that weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay, that lie.

ADDED: Here's a commission-earned link to Thompson's book