We all had our best friends with whom we went on great adventures as children, but did we experience a loss of innocence with them? "Stand By Me" is a good movie that tires, perhaps a tad too hard, to answer that question by combining a sense of youth adventure with the seriousness of the loss of innocence.
The films stars Will Wheaton as Gordie LaChance, a typical kid growing up in a small town in the 1950s, which makes for a real American atmosphere. Gordie and his three best friends have a secret club of sorts, but each member is quite different. There is Chris (Phoenix), the leader of the gang and part-time troublemaker; Teddy (Feldman), the hyper kid with an over-active imagination; and Vern (O'Connell), the geeky fat kid they all pick on. The boys are all 12 years old, but they seem a rather mature for their age as they constantly smoke and swear like old men.
One day Vern tells the guys he overheard his brother figure out the location of a missing child, who everyone assumes is dead and the town is upset over this. They all become excited when they realize they could become heroes if they find the boy's body.
They set out on a long hike through the woods and mountains, covering over 20 miles, but they consider it an unrealistic goal. But the film is not about finding the body, it's about the journey itself, and this provides for the good sense of innocence.
Meanwhile, a group of bullies who are much older but less mature than Gordie and his friends have come up with the same plan. The entire film is essentially a study to compare and contrast the two sets of characters and what they represent: Gordie's gang = innocence and adventure; the bullies = being brutal and desensitized for sake of doing so.
Most of the film depicts Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern's quest and many things happen to them on the way, both funny and serious. They get into a fight with a junkyard owner and his dog, they out-run a train on a bridge, they tell stories of their future sexual conquests, and they have a traumatic experience with leeches. No plot forms, instead, everything is just characterization, dialogue, and camaraderie which makes for a good, lighthearted story. The only problem is sometimes it goes overboard and becomes sappy. All the boys break down in tears at least once as they talk about something bad that has happened to them. They realize they're growing up, and when they finally see the dead body their lives are changed instantly.
"Stand By Me" is a good coming-of-age film, but as hard as it tries to be more than that, that's really all it is.
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