★★

Leaving the theater after viewing Reagan, I felt the opposite of how I imagine almost everyone else who liked the film probably felt.  Instead of feeling the sunny optimism emblematic of the Gipper himself, I felt an overwhelming sense of depression and disappointment.

Yet I also felt the opposite of how I assume people who didn’t like the film felt.  Instead of feeling eagerness to diminish Ronald Reagan the man and Reagan the president by diminishing Reagan the film, I felt just as overwhelming a desire to overlook my better judgment and praise it.

The result of my better judgment prevailing is this piece here that I hope will make sense of Reagan the man, Reagan the film, and, to a lesser extent, myself and my own thoughts and relationship with the memory of Ronald Reagan.  I use the term “memory” differently here because at the risk of revealing my age, I was not alive during Reagan’s presidency.

My earliest personal memory of Reagan was his funeral.  I remember the news in June, 2004.  I remember seeing Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev pay their respects in the Capitol Rotunda, and later on the image of Nancy tearfully kissing his casket.  At the time, I knew only that he was the favorite president of both my parents.  Those memories returned to me in the most visceral way when the images showed up alongside the credits for the Reagan biopic, and I will not deny that I was moved.

But Reagan the film misses opportunities to focus its character narrative even as it attempts to play the hits from a unique point of view.  That point of view in this case being Jon Voigt’s fictional ex-KGB agent Petrovich, narrating the story like it’s Life of Pi and he’s the Russian version of Lee Daniels’ The Butler who saw Reagan coming 30 years before the rest of the Soviets did, and was the only one to take him seriously and foresee Reagan as the harbinger of communism’s downfall.  It’s a premise so silly and flattering that it almost does Reagan a disservice.  Yet what critics miss is that Reagan also bears the DNA of an even more unique biopic of the 40th President.  Not just Paul Kengor’s 2006 book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which the film credits for its script, but also Edmund Morris’s Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan from 1999.  That book may not be in the credits, but it is the reason Director Sean McNamara and screenwriter Howie Klausner came up with the idea of Reagan being remembered primarily through the viewpoint of a fictional character intimately observing his entire life.

Reagan is less confusing than Morris’s Dutch, but only because its “agenda” is more obvious.  I can’t object, obviously, but this is where Reagan’s own complexity as a person, a life, a movement, a presidency, and an era go deeper than the hits the film plays.  And make no mistake – if you’re an admirer of Ronald Reagan, as I am, there are no shortage of hits the film plays.  The 1964 Republican National Convention speech, dealing with Berkeley protests as Governor, “there you go again,” in his debate with Jimmy Carter, the jokes he made after the assassination attempt, the joke he made about age and politics in his debate with Walter Mondale, his summits with Mikhail Gorbachev, and, of course, his speech at the Berlin Wall.  Some of these moments are better earned than others.  The climax of the film is the Berlin Wall speech, but the payoff there is less about Reagan himself and more about the team of speechwriters who labored over it as a checkmate and kill shot to the Soviets.

So the biggest speech of Reagan’s life and career – the signature speech of the Cold War’s end, and the closest thing in history to a real-life “Open Sesame” moment – is, to the extent Reagan himself has anything to do with it, just a good speech he didn’t edit after being given the draft?

This is not just a narrative problem.  This is a character problem, and in attempting to honor Reagan the film unintentionally undermines him.  And it reveals that the best insights from Morris’s Dutch went entirely unheeded.  Reagan had an image larger than any other human being in the world during his presidency, and yet all the while was an immensely private person.  Most people who met him and interacted with him regularly came away with two contradictory takeaways: (1) what you saw was what you got; and (2) they didn’t really know him that well.  Not because he was particularly eccentric or attention deficit, or because he was an old man with an old Hollywood brain, but rather because he is someone whose mind and heart always operated in different dimensional spheres at the same time, and his mouth could give eloquence to both whenever he needed it to.  And that’s how a lifeguard who studies the currents of a river – on the surface and in layers below – can translate that style of thinking to global affairs.

But when Reagan explains this to Nancy in an intimate moment between them, it falls flat because by this point, he has not been a lifeguard in quite a good bit of time, and the film gives us some rather funny and endearing reasons to doubt that he was a savant in the art of lifesaving.  So this can’t work, nor does the spirituality, despite the film’s intense labors.  Politics complicates faith, but faith can clarify politics.  Reagan the film attempts to straddle both sides of this truism, but it can’t make sense of either.  If this is a story less about Reagan as a human and more about the downfall of an empire that rejects God, then are we to believe that God molded Reagan into his messenger against communism and the wayward Russians?  Or is Reagan trying to say that to live optimistically as Reagan did is to trust God and see Him in all things beautiful, even in flawed humans and difficult people?

Its difficulty with the latter is more than understandable.  Political rhetoric, and to a lesser extent political filmmaking, has an ongoing problem in pretending as though leaders need to be reminded every now and again of just how much they care and have their hearts in the right place.  When Barack Obama sang Joe Biden’s praises at the DNC two weeks ago, perhaps the silliest thing he said in his speech was of how awestruck he was at Biden’s everyday empathy when working with him in the White House.  Really?  So how did that conversation go: “Hey Joe, you think we ought to screw the people over maybe just this once?”  “Barack, c’mon, man.  Gotta remember why you have this job to begin with!  It’s to help lift people up!”  Leaders talk all the time as though this is how their day goes, and Reagan, unfortunately, has this problem too.  As if people in the White House Situation Room conference table need a reminder every now and then that people do more and better with their lives and jobs when taxes are low.

But to be fair to Reagan the film, a surefire part of the reason Hollywood never made a drama about his presidency, leftist bias aside, is the same reason it never made a drama about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  These are difficult ideas and principles to convey in a dramatic fashion, especially if you’re trying not to use dark shadows of back rooms for cynical politics like Spielberg did in Lincoln.  I notice as I read other reviews of Reagan that no one seems to have any other movie in mind to which to compare it.  Unfortunately, you can’t look too deeply into Reagan’s own filmography, outside of maybe two of his better films, Stuart Heisler’s Storm Warning (1950) and Don Siegel’s The Killers, both of which are pessimistic and terrifying, to capture anything resembling his ideological idealism and affectionate patriotism.  Reagan the film, in other words, is actually elevated in part because it has no direct competition.

Reagan himself does not fit neatly into any heroic archetype.  He is not beloved or at least respected because he advanced a great change or because he stopped some many bad things, or just because he was a happy warrior in an era of malaise and a revolutionary speaker who backed up his humor with a steely resolve.  Nor was he just an evangelist of traditional values or the street cop that Richard Nixon ran as in 1968.  Much of this is projected onto him in place of what they either can’t understand or weren’t privy to due to Reagan’s private habits.

In fact the only one who truly knew Ronald Reagan, both when he was the President and when he was politically active with an ever increasing national profile, was Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller).  And here-in lies Reagan the film’s greatest strengths.  When Ronnie and Nancy are together, the chemistry between Quaid and Miller transforms the film into the aspirational romance that was their life.  Their initial meeting is adorable (and accurate), they have a brightness in their eyes when they look at each other, or when she looks at him on the podium, and Miller especially brings with her into the role a subtle flavor of Nancy’s own ambitions that perfectly complemented Ronnie’s, and a protective wolf den mother’s instincts when he was surrounded by people whose interests did not always reside in Reagan’s success.  One of the dirty secrets of the Reagan White House was that everyone walked on eggshells to avoid getting on Nancy’s bad side.  She may never have contributed to policy, but she was a strict regimentarian amongst the staff.  In today’s Hollywood, any woman in a political role acting like that could never possibly be interested in anyone other than herself, and certainly not for a man.  But with Nancy, it really was all out of her love and concern for her husband the President, and this is what makes her both complicated and a refreshing departure from today’s “strong” woman boss of Hollywood.

Reagan‘s best quality by far are in the little moments between him and Nancy, when they ride horses together, act in goofy commercials together, and sleep in each other’s arms, or when Ronnie is sharing a part of his vision with her and she looks like she’s falling even deeper in love with him, not merely because she agrees but because she is his first constituent who believes what he says and in him as he says it.  And it seems like almost every time the film leaves them for a signature moment from Reagan’s presidency and career, or returns to the old Soviets as they mull their own empire’s demise and marvel at its smiling killer, it looks cheaper and more contrived, even as real events are depicted.

There is one final dimension to Reagan that no honest review can omit.  This is also a film about Donald Trump’s current attempt at a political comeback.  Whether McNamara intended this or not, the opening of the film, where Reagan’s union buster speech is followed by Hinkley’s attempt on his life, bears an immediate and visceral resemblance to the attempt on Trump’s life a month and a half ago.  Trump today borrows from Reagan’s 1980 debate closer line: “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” for the new era of inflation, and 2024 as a political year bears a good deal of resemblance to 1980, whether it ends up with the same result or not.  While the parallel doesn’t go deeper than that, how one feels about Trump will certainly bear upon how one receives Reagan the film.  But this is also where Reagan’s profile differs.  No one would ever make a film about Donald and Melania Trump’s love for one another, whereas I could watch an entire film with nothing but Ronnie reading his love letters to Nancy as a narration over landscape shots over America, and I would feel more intimately connected with Reagan than any political depiction here.  But it is only after watching Quaid and Miller together that this detail strikes me.

It all makes for a strangely unworkable yet occasionally moving picture that leaves me as conflicted as I close the review as I was when I opened it.  Ronald Reagan’s life and presidency has been a subject of my own personal fascination since before his death, and I do not hide my admiration for him.  Reagan the film as an experience does not add much to my interest.  There is no moment from the film that I would use as a substitute for the real one.  But I am also too cynical for my own good.  McNamara and Quaid are not the political evangelists that Reagan’s legacy demands of any storyteller.  Yet deep within the film are moments that key ever so delicately into the flawed and beautiful human being behind the camera, who could be all that so many Americans wanted and needed at the right time, who could anticipate the fury of changing tides and solve problems big and small.  Dennis Quaid acts like he knew the man, and whatever else there is to say, America owes him thanks for that.

– Vivek