‘Reagan’: A Biopic That Unfolds Like the Staff of the Heritage Foundation Wrote It

Sean McNamara’s new biopic Reagan, which opened at the end of August, had much going for it upon its release: great timing during an unpredictable Presidential election, a favorable political environment for a film on the 40th President of the United States, and a well-known actor, Dennis Quaid, in the lead role backed by a decent supporting cast.  Unfortunately, what it doesn’t have is the perspective, seriousness, or heft that will make it interesting for anyone but diehard Reaganites, dedicated anti-communists, or moviegoers who like fairy tales and easy explanations for complicated subjects.

Reagan hit theaters right before the Labor Day holiday, which during Presidential election years like this one, kicks off the period when even unattentive voters supposedly pay attention to campaign politics. During the lead up to the film’s release, events that even the best filmmaker couldn’t have dreamed up produced a Summer that featured an attempted Presidential assassination (as Ronald Reagan faced), a sitting President left the race, then a Californian, where Reagan started his political career, unexpectedly rose to the top of a political ticket, putting the nation’s most populous state at the center of American Presidential politics in a way it hasn’t been since the Gipper retired to the Golden State after leaving office.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, influential segments of the GOP’s base increasingly question key elements of Ronald Reagan’s domestic and foreign policy doctrines in ways that would have been unfathomable just a decade ago, What a perfect time for a film that portrayed the complexity of Reagan’s life, his political ascendancy, and his significant impact on the country. Reagan, however, isn’t that movie.

Instead, Reagan is a mostly silly, unserious, and totally one-sided look at the former President that probably makes even some of Reagan’s diehard supporters blush. The film is based on a screenplay that uses Reagan historian Paul Kengor’s 2007 book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” as its guide. Like much of Kengor’s work, the film presents Reagan as a dedicated man of Christian faith on a lifelong crusade against communism and determined to defeat the Soviet Union, in part because of its restrictions on freedom of religion.  The film ascribes the fall of the Soviet Union solely to Reagan’s fierce determination to defeat it. In fact, the entire film uses the lens of U.S.-Soviet relations to explore Reagan’s full life back to childhood. How it does this is almost the stuff of comedy.

The movie opens with John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan just months into his Presidency. But, then, bafflingly, the movie pivots to a chronological tale of Reagan’s life from childhood as narrated by retired KGB agent, Victor Petrovich, a fictional character played by Jon Voight who, apparently, is a composite character created from the stories of several real KGB agents and intelligence officials. Petrovich explains Reagan’s life to an up-and-coming KGB officer-in-training who demands to know from Petrovich how it is that the motherland (now Russia) lost the Cold War to America. How could this be, the KGB-wannabe asks?

Let me tell you a story, Petrovich says. And it’s a story he is perfectly happy to tell because Petrovich was supposedly the one Soviet agent that predicted that “the Crusader” (which is how Petrovich refers to Reagan throughout the movie) was the one man in the U.S.A. that the Soviets should fear the most, even years before Reagan rose to the Presidency. “I knew he was the one,” Petrovich intones. We then go through Reagan’s life story as told from the perspective of a defeated, disheveld ex-Soviet spy.

We follow Reagan’s life from Dixon, Illinois to Hollywood, to Sacramento, then, ultimately to Washington and then back to California for his twilight years. From lessons learned in church as a young boy, to his heroism and manliness as a verile young lifeguard and football player, to his leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, the movie gives us Ronald Reagan as a man of deep moral and religious convictions who harbors a deep antipathy to communism and finds his calling in battling communists, whether they are in Hollywood or in the Soviet Union (or at UC-Berkeley). “God has a purpose for you, Dutch,” Reagan hears at a young age. And, really, that is about the level of historical heft this film has over its two-hour-plus run time.

Religious and moral righteousness characterizes most of the film as it traces Reagan’s rise to California’s governorship, then finally the Presidency. Throughout, the film portrays Reagan as a good man (of the people) who only wants good to triumph over evil. Ronnie, as second wife Nancy refers to him, is a good man who takes on bullies because that is what his religious mother taught him. The film also portrays him as a defender of civil rights.

At a time when a serious narrative look at the domestic policies of the two Reagan terms would be welcome, Reagan mostly skips that part of the Reagan legacy. It briefly touches upon tax cuts and gives a nod to the air traffic controller strike, but only to show that Reagan believes, as good men do, in the importance of keeping your word when codified in contracts. We get a little of his bromance with Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, but mostly to show what a good, friendly guy Reagan was. It thoroughly ignores all other domestic issues as the film focuses instead on foreign policy amid Reagan’s singular role in bringing down the Soviet Union through a mix of steadfastness, honor, and love of America.

Not surprisingly, the film showcases Reagan as both a tough negotiator with Mikhail Gorbachev (after several Soviet leaders die, some after swigging directly from Vodka bottles) and a man with a common touch who knows that two men can always figure out their problems mano a mano while walking on his rustic ranch. The movie, of course, meticulously walks through Reagan’s famous speech in West Berlin in 1987 when Reagan challenged the Soviet leader to “tear down this wall.” At that moment, Petrovich notes he knew the Crusader had won the Cold War. Margaret Thatcher, watching the speech in England, exclaims breathlessly, “well done, cowboy.”

With its foreign policy bent, there is no way the film could ignore the Iran Contra affair, the complicated scandal that, for a time, put a serious dent in Reagan’s popularity and the full truth of which remains opaque even decades later.  It does its best, of course, to show Reagan in the best light, however, as when it focuses on his speech to the American people in 1987 which noted that “facts and evidence” indicate that the scheme likely occurred in his Administration despite saying otherwise several months prior.

The film makes its stance on the Iran Contra matter clear when, in a meeting, the Cabinet discusses the issue of support for the Nicaraguan contras. The camera focuses for several obvious moments on the shifty eyes and Mona Lisa-like smile of CIA Director, William Casey, who, in reality, shouldered a chunk of the blame for the illegal effort and who conveniently died just as public Congressional hearings on the controversy got underway. The obvious implication of the film is that Casey (and others) served Reagan poorly, since a good, truth-telling man like him wouldn’t break the law or the trust of the American people.

Obviously, any biopic will have a viewpoint and its own specific framing, but the ones that shape Reagan are so strong, so obvious and so heavy-handed that it is hard to take much of the movie seriously.  The movie paints any Reagan detractor, briefly, as either a clueless and naive dirty hippie college student as during Reagan’s California governorship, or reduced to a collection of screaming, mostly gay protestors in a strange MTV-like music video montage of activists speaking out against Reagan’s mostly non-existent policies on the AIDS epidemic while Genesis’s Land of Confusion plays (the original music video for the song actually lampoons Reagan).

About the only mildly moving part of the film comes at its end, as Reagan returns to California after his Presidency. As beautiful images of the Santa Ynez Valley, where Reagan’s famous ranch nestles in the mountainous region northwest of Santa Barbara, fill the screen, Dennis Quaid reads Reagan’s letter to the American people about his Alzeheimer’s diagnosis. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” the voice says as the warm California sun sets over the Santa Ynez mountains.  It’s a nice touch.

The finale is moving, yet it is of a similar piece to the rest of the film. Yes, Ron and Nancy spent time on the Reagan ranch during his post Presidency.  But they spent most of their time after Reagan left office in his home in Bel Air, the ritzy elite Los Angeles enclave near his office in a Century City complex. Such images of decadent and godless L.A., of course, wouldn’t be as gripping as the mythical Reagan ranch and if there was anything that Reagan truly understood from his time in Hollywood onward, it was image-making. And the filmmakers behind this movie are more than happy to keep the myth-making going.

Now, despite widespread reservations about the film here and elsewhere, all of this is not to say there isn’t a market for a movie that unfolds like it was cooked up in a Claremont Institute conference room, written by executives at the Heritage Foundation, edited by film students at Hillsdale College, and given a soundtrack by Lee Greenwood. The movie is outpacing expectations at the box office and conservative viewers, not surprisingly, are embracing it in significant numbers as they did last year’s surprise film hit, Sound of Freedom.  Yet, at a time when it is more important than ever for the country’s sake to move past old divisions and tired arguments, this propaganda-laden film reinforces the same old divides on Ronald Reagan and Reaganism that have existed for more than several decades.  What a missed opportunity.