One for the Gipper
The sweeping new Reagan biopic is watchable but dramatically unchallenging
Sean McNamara’s sunny docudrama Reagan with Dennis Quaid as the title character premiered this weekend in the midst of a decidedly darker (whatever your persuasion) election cycle. No doubt some in Hollywood circles do not like the fact that this film, based on Paul Kengor’s The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, has come out. Critics have slammed it as a “hagiography” or “the worst movie of the year” and MAGA propaganda. In fact, Facebook actually suppressed advertisements for the film for allegedly trying to influence the current election. But Quaid noted in response, Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, is not eligible for the ballot.
While the 18% rating from Rotten Tomatoes is much undeserved (most of the new trash on streaming platforms gets better reviews), the film is a decidedly sympathetic portrait of the 40th President that tries to do too much and comes up short of offering anything like a compelling character study.
This isn’t necessarily surprising though, because Reagan is actually a poor subject for a film. As Edmund Morris found in writing his biography Dutch, Reagan had but a few people who actually knew him besides his wife, Nancy. To portray Reagan, one must either invent new characters (as Morris did) or simply offer a journalistic account of history. What the film does is offer an unchallenging and intermittently engrossing account of Reagan’s life and career as President.
The film begins with the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan, and then backtracks through his early life in Dixon, Illinois as a young boy with an alcoholic father, his bucolic years as a lifeguard and into his time in Hollywood, first as an actor and then as the anti-communist SAG president. A poorly de-aged 70-year-old Quaid portrays Reagan as fighting communist influences in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s as his acting career wanes.
All of this is paced and written like a reenactment show for visitors at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, but it doesn’t add up to a dramatic presentation. It’s all spun too quickly, with successive, brightly colored newspaper montages to keep the audiences up to date. Tying the narrative together is an effectively weathered and raspy Jon Voight as ex-KGB agent Viktor Petrovich, who had been assigned to follow and profile Reagan all those years. Just like Morris’ experimental biography, the film invents a fictional character through which the audience can watch Reagan without ever really knowing him.
The film improves in the second half, as the plot settles into the 1980s and hones in on the Cold War and Reagan’s fight to beat the Soviets. All of this makes a fairly compelling history lesson, but actually falls short on interpretation. Quaid himself channels Reagan’s charm and humor, but the writing fails to allow for even surface level treatment of Reagan’s inner dialogue as he trades Hollywood for the world stage. One can speculate that a film could explore Reagan’s reaction to seeing his children grow up and politically distance themselves from him, or when Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel confronted him about visiting the Bitburg SS military cemetery (prompting him to add concentration camp Bergen-Belson to his visit). But would any of this fit neatly into the film’s already loaded plot? Doubtful. Like Reagan’s diary entries, this biopic is a fairly straightforward presentation of major events, only in this case with ample set decoration and music. Filmmaker McNamara does a good workmanlike job with little to work with - as revealed in his diaries and biographies, Reagan was a closed book.
Mercifully, the film spares us the uglier moments of Reagan’s battle with Alzheimer's post-Presidency and ends with an over-extended sequence in which Reagan literally rides off into the sunset. For many filmmakers, this part of his life would actually make the most dramatically interesting material for a film, but McNamara opts to give us a pleasantly unchallenging ending. Actually, compared to the dark tone of so many realistic dramas, the milky aftertaste is a welcome change, even if the means to that effect seem tidally shallow.
While the film cannot overcome the challenges of its subject, to criticize this film as being political is more unfair than you might think. Few reviewers seem to understand this sympathetic portrayal of a historical figure does not add up to political propaganda - at least in the contentious sense of today’s politics. The heart of the film lies in its second half focusing on Reagan’s relationship with Nancy (played by Penelope Ann Miller) and his efforts to defeat the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. In the film, meeting Nancy is the turning point for the self-proclaimed divorced B-Movie actor with children. Nancy will support him as he increasingly turns to politics. While reviewers have criticized the film for glancing over or giving cursory treatment to the Iran-Contra Scandal (which does actually receive several scenes) and the AIDS crisis, neither does the film wax on about Reagan’s affinity for Milton Friedman and supply-side economics. In fact, any acknowledgment of Reagan’s ability to give voice to the conservative viewpoint regarding limited government is oddly missing or reduced to a folksy explanation for not raising taxes. This is confusing because Reagan’s political orientation motivated him to fight what the film is about - his ability as a leader and communicator to successfully bring down the Soviet Union. The problem is that many people’s historical memory no longer extends to the Cold War and hence have no context with which to appreciate the threat it represented. Without that context, Reagan’s conviction to fight communism in the film feels preachy and foreign, like a 1960s issue of the National Review.
Reagan believed as many people then did that communism represented an existential threat to global freedom. The film does not unfortunately delve into why Reagan believed that, but it does channel his iron conviction. The depicted 1986 Reykjavík Summit sees Premier Mikhail Gorbachev chiding a stubborn Reagan for not accepting the Soviet terms for an arms treaty. The Soviet leader warns that Reagan is giving up a chance to make diplomatic history. Reagan glares across the table at Gorbachev’s poker face and, deciding that he can get better terms, calls the Premier’s bluff: “Njet.” The climax of the film, even if more symbolic than dramatic, is Reagan's most famous speech, his 1987 address in West Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Whatever Reagan’s ideology, his conviction as “the Great Communicator” did more to break the Iron Curtain than any prior arms treaty.
No doubt the film preaches to its crowd, but then many Hollywood films do as well. If anything, this is a symptom of divided times to which Ronald Reagan’s optimism appears antiquated. What this film does successfully is portray a time when a man with Reagan’s leadership qualities could and did succeed in uniting the country (winning in his 1984 reelection campaign every single state except for Minnesota). In fact, as Quaid’s affable portrayal reminds us, Reagan used humor and an understanding of human nature to reach across ideological divides, whether it be Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill or Premier Gorbachev. Even those who disagreed with him ideologically gave him credit for reversing the crisis of confidence and deep malaise - from the Vietnam nightmare to President Nixon’s resignation into the years of President Carter’s stagflation - that forced Americans to wonder if communism was actually winning the battle of ideas. Undeniably, President Reagan played a key part in restoring optimism to America and bringing about the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union.
If this film, like its namesake, is perpetually sunny in its treatment, a Reagan biopic need not sideline his accomplishments to be dramatically successful or even-handed.