‘Reagan’ Is Everything the Right Gets Wrong About Art
There’s a reason that hardline American conservatives regard so many books, movies, TV shows, music, theater, and other creative arts as ideologically poisonous, tools for “indoctrinating” people with “woke” values or “grooming” children to adopt an LGBTQ+ identity and become sexually permissive. It’s because they find little value in a piece of entertainment beyond its reinforcement of a political agenda and preferred cultural norms. To many of the far-right persuasion, Hollywood being a liberal place means it necessarily produces content to liberalize the masses.
Therefore, the right is left to develop counterprogramming — the fare to comfort them with unambiguous assurances that they are right, and they are the good guys. Some of these efforts aim for a break from the mainstream; consider Angel Studios, the Utah-based streamer and production company that focuses on religiously themed material and had a breakout hit with the child-trafficking drama Sound of Freedom. Alternatively, you can pull together a lot of washed-up talent, including various actors who claim that they’re victims of discrimination in Tinseltown due to their right-wing views, to make a muddled bore like Reagan, starring Trump booster Dennis Quaid as the Gipper.
Reagan presents the comically oversimplified perspective that President Ronald Reagan was singularly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the only way one could enjoy the film is to already believe that. Even this may not be enough, because rather than focus on any given stretch of Reagan’s life — most of which could have made for a compelling story — the film blunders through a full seven decades in the course of a tedious two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Historians certainly can and should identify the copious inaccuracies of Reagan, if only for the record (his long opposition to civil rights legislation doesn’t make the cut, for example). But it would be foolish to hope those criticisms mean anything to viewers who came for mindless hero-worship and got plenty.
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It might be more illuminating, then, to examine how director Sean McNamara fails to weld an actual drama to the scaffolding of propaganda. Here, the inability to make art out of Ronald Reagan speaks not to his worthlessness as a subject but to a poverty of imagination. (The author J.G. Ballard had no such issues.) In fact, Reagan can’t even trace the broad outlines of your stock biopic, because it refuses to allow in its protagonist any kind of complicating flaw, and the geopolitical stalemate that acts as the primary conflict is too big and abstract for the frame. Instead, you get years upon years of pre-presidency Reagan grumbling about communism to anyone who will listen, and those people being impressed by this for some reason.
The movie condescends to its own faithful as well. Since there’s lots of ground to cover, we’re treated to new characters entering and exiting as if by revolving door, adding nothing to the narrative in their slivers of screentime. Absent scenes where we learn who they are and why they matter, they are introduced with name captions. But why should we care if that guy is Caspar Weinberger or the other is William P. Clark? The filmmakers sure don’t; we’re skimming Wikipedia. They have so little trust in the audience’s ability to go on context clues that they needlessly label familiar scenery, too: A shot of the Golden Gate Bridge bears the words “San Francisco, CA,” while a cut to Big Ben looming over the Thames receives a “London, U.K.” chyron. Never before I have a watched the cinematic equivalent of a Ben Garrison cartoon. Shame they didn’t slap “Washington, D.C.” over the White House.
Questions of craft must have been seen as a mere distraction from the message of Reagan. The dire wigs and makeup suggest that no queer people were allowed on set, and as the younger Reagan, Quaid looks practically Facetuned. The attempt to periodically de-age Jon Voight, who plays an old, fictional ex-KGB spy, is doomed from the start, as is the choice to frame the president’s life as a tale of civilizational struggle spun through his miserable Russian accent. (As a related aside, Quaid never quite settles on a pronunciation of “Gorbachev.”) The movie also just looks awful, with muddled depth of field and borders of queasy light that are perhaps meant to evoke Reagan’s saintliness but frequently give the sense that the actors have been digitally inserted into a room.
It’s one thing to release a hack picture — in that sense, Reagan is a fitting tribute — and another to imbue it with such self-importance that it has no sense of humor or irony. The two or three jokes were met with a forced chuckle from the same number of theatergoers, while unintentionally hilarious lines, like Reagan telling Nancy early in their courtship that “There’s nothing like the relationship with a horse,” pass us by without so much as a double-take. We hear Reagan, in his 1983 speech calling the U.S.S.R. an “evil empire,” quote C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, remarking that the greatest evil is no longer carried out in dens of crime but “clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice” — as if we won’t object that he escalated the War on Drugs and ignored the AIDS crisis from the Oval Office, while being clean-shaven. Elsewhere, Reagan solemnly intones, “family is important.” An emotionally detached and absent father, the man didn’t recognize his own son after speaking at the young man’s high school graduation. Give Reagan credit for this detail, then: The kids disappear by 1969.
The mythology is insulting enough without casting Creed frontman Scott Stapp to do an embarrassing cameo as Frank Sinatra or Kevin Sorbo as the minister who baptizes young Ronnie. Still, the whitewashing of Reagan’s red-baiting remains the movie’s defining sin, and a testament to how any sense of portraiture is swamped by the petty desire to win a one-sided debate. You see it in everything from the depiction of communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as an effete gay foil to Cowboy Reagan (there is no serious speculation that Trumbo, who had a long marriage to Cleo Fincher and three children with her, wasn’t straight), to the automatic presumption that funding the Contras in Nicaragua was justified, to the mawkish idea of Voight’s KGB character slowly realizing that Reagan is an anointed crusader who will bring about world peace.
Well … why not? The word “commie” means nothing more to the MAGA right in 2024 than it did to Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in 1954: the opportunity to scare people with a fake crisis and thereby control them. Ultimately, Reagan is a greater affront to the 40th president of the United States than anything I could say about him, since it dispenses with the human being to achieve a hologram of his likeness, faker than the Strategic Defense Initiative. Biography, at its best, wrangles with the contradictions of figures known for their influence and power. Reagan is merely concerned with having both.