It’s fitting that Ronald Reagan spent many years of his all-American life in Hollywood. His trajectory — from small-town boy in Illinois to lifeguard to Eureka College football player to actor to TV pitchman to governor to president — somehow both embodies and transcends his era. It demands a feature-length, biopic adaptation.
Yet Hollywood being what it is, there wasn’t one. Audiences have instead mostly been treated to Reagan in cameos and bit parts, typically (though sometimes at least amusingly) caricatured beyond recognition. Take Lee Daniels’s The Butler, which presents a fictionalized version of the life of Eugene Allen, a black man who served as a White House butler for 34 years, through multiple presidents, including Reagan. But Reagan (Alan Rickman) in The Butler is a mischievous somnambulant who is also racially retrograde (a fabrication).
We can dispense quickly with what Reagan, the new feature film starring Dennis Quaid and directed by Sean McNamara, does right. Quaid is passable in the title role. He adequately portrays the mannerisms and sometimes approximates the aura of Reagan himself. His vocal mimicry of Reagan is (mostly) not distracting, though it has been done better. The rest of the cast is fine. It is full of performers best described as “that guy”: serviceable character actors of sufficient ubiquity to inspire a vague sense of recognition. They might have been the only ones, outside of known conservatives in Reagan such as Jon Voight and Nick Searcy, willing to appear in the rare movie that is not merely not outright hostile to Reagan, but on his side. That is, itself, a kind of relief for the conservative moviegoer, but . . . more on that later.
Yet this only makes its failures more frustrating. Start with the structure.
Reagan, bizarrely, directs attention away from Reagan himself. It is presented as a frame narrative, told by the fictional former KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (Voight). Paul Kengor, the Reagan historian on whose books The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life the movie is based, described Viktor as a composite of the many Soviet agents known to have monitored Reagan over the years, and “a smart way for the producers to keep the integrity of the story and yet make it entertaining.”
It’s possible to conceive of a way this might have worked. Imagine a Viktor at the end of the Cold War, flashing back to when he first received his Reagan ‘assignment.’ To understand Reagan, he examines his life up to that point, bringing us back to his upbringing. He then continues to advise his Soviet superiors on Reagan as Reagan’s rise continues, all the way up to and through the presidency. Viktor’s study of Reagan, at first detached and clinical, compromises his objectivity, until he ultimately realizes Reagan was right about communism and about the Soviet Union. Think It’s a Wonderful Life crossed with The Lives of Others.
What Reagan does instead makes no sense. It shows Viktor in Russia in the present day, visited by a young politician (Alex Sparrow) being groomed as Vladimir Putin’s successor. Viktor tells Reagan’s life story to this young man so that he can understand what went wrong for Russia during the Cold War. Conversations between the two periodically interrupt depictions of Reagan’s life, and Voight’s Russian-accented English forcibly hovers over many of the biographical events the two don’t interrupt, providing contrived assessments and explanations of what is going on. And this frame narrative ends with the apparent implication that the young politician now aspires to become Russia’s Reagan, a thematic takeaway of baffling intention, if meant deliberately. Dropping this aspect entirely could have improved the movie significantly.
But it could not have salvaged Reagan. That is, in part, because it attempts to do too much. A complete depiction of Reagan’s life over a little more than two hours is an ambitious task. Reagan does not rise to it. It moves so quickly that it becomes a staccato collection of moments. Hey, there’s Reagan as a lifeguard! Oh, there he is playing football at Eureka! Look, now he’s in Hollywood! Wait, now he’s doing commercials! Also, his mom died! You’d be better off turning to any of the excellent biographies of Reagan to learn about his life with any meaningful depth.
The treatment of Reagan’s presidency is similar. It provides a superficial highlight reel that does not capture his political skills. On the whole, this all-of-the-above approach not only shortchanges individual scenes, even those that show or reference rightly famous moments from Reagan’s life, but also forces these shortened sequences to over-rely on the tropes and cliches that serve as crutches for the strained screenwriter. Overly explanatory dialogue, always a risk even for the best biopics, is abundant throughout. Nancy Reagan (Penelope Ann Miller) is saddled with much of it.
Reagan aims to present its subject sympathetically, if not flatter him outright. But its approach for doing so fails. Despite all the voiceovers, all the explanations, all the helpful on-screen text telling us where and when we are, the movie cannot overcome the fact that it somehow at once asks too much of viewers and trusts them too little. It assumes that, with its clunky help, we can overcome its deficient provision of context and its failure to give us anything more than surface-level impressions of what is being depicted (an inevitable byproduct of its unwieldy scope). The end result, however, is that while some people might come out of the movie having learned a few interesting facts about Reagan’s life, they will not have come to understand him any better. Up to a certain point, he is shown, in rote fashion, as a mere product of inputs around him; after that, he is driven by an unexplained core the movie does not meaningfully explore or elaborate upon.
Reagan is like a glimpse into some alternate-universe Hollywood, dominated by right-wing hacks instead of left-wing ones, who reliably produce nigh-propagandistic films about subjects and people that suit their interests instead. You’d need to be pretty stubborn, as a conservative, not to take some joy in seeing Reagan presented positively, in hearing the name Whittaker Chambers spoken aloud without condemnation, or in witnessing the Soviet Union depicted as the “evil empire” it was. It may feel natural to do so.
But these are cheap thrills, and false joys.
Reagan doesn’t even succeed as propaganda, as it doesn’t know how to transmit its message or even what that message really is. It leaves us only with warm fuzzies about Reagan (reinforced by a credits sequence I found emotionally manipulative and possibly a bit tasteless). But vibes are a disservice to one of the greatest men of the twentieth century, a man who restored America’s faith in freedom and in itself while peaceably vanquishing its most fearsome adversary.
There will be — indeed, there already is — an attempt to persuade the Right to watch Reagan as a kind of political obligation. Hostile reviews in the mainstream press will likely motivate this effort through negative partisanship and a divide between elites (herein represented by film critics) and the common people (moviegoers). But to criticize Reagan is not to criticize Reagan, a figure of enduring relevance today, despite what some argue. In fact, to have squandered a chance to convey his greatness — honestly, skillfully, and in full — to the world is the real offense. Conservatives should not accept propaganda (especially when it’s poorly done). Those who have longed for a satisfactory depiction of Reagan’s made-for-the-movies life will have to keep waiting.