Ronald Reagan DESTROYS Communism In 'Reagan'
A new Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid lets grandpa relive all the old soundbites.
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Yes, a biopic about Ronald Reagan starring Dennis Quaid as the Gipper hit theaters this past weekend. If you didn’t hear about Reagan before now, that’s probably because it came from a brand new distributor, started by veterans of Lionsgate’s faith-based film distribution division, which made modest profits releasing niche products like this and not advertising them in the traditional ways to the traditional people (think: more email campaigns to get churches to buy out whole blocks of tickets, fewer promos during primetime television).
If you heard anything about Reagan at all, it was probably that Creed frontman Scott Stapp plays Frank Sinatra in the film, which is true, though he’s in it for a grand total of less than 30 seconds. Even in that brief window, during which Stapp has no speaking lines, it’s nearly impossible to convey the uncanniness of the performance. Where the popular conception of Sinatra is generally that he was suave, understated, and effortlessly cool, Stapp’s take is intense and kinetic, nearly doubling over with jerky, fully body contortions in between rubber-faced hamming, like Mask-era Jim Carrey starring in a music video for the Cherry Poppin Daddies. He does more swooning than crooning. I won’t say it’s a microcosm of the film as a whole, but it’s certainly something.
However they heard about it (Reagan didn’t screen for critics), my late morning matinee seemed to be attended by just a small handful of gentle folk from the local nursing homes, probably looking to pass a few quiet hours before death hearing the old fairytales about tax cuts and Communism. Probably the best moment of the film came when Olek Krupa, who looks nothing like Mikhail Gorbachev but was wearing the instantly recognizable Gorbachev Halloween costume, with bald pate and bright red birthmark, showed up in the film as Gorbachev for the first time. At which point an elderly woman sitting two rows in front of me said to her friend, loud enough for the entire theater to hear, “THAT’S GORBACHEV.”
Indeed, ma’am. Indeed.
Reagan, from Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite director Sean McNamara and starring C. Thomas Howell as Caspar Weinberger, is somehow not your typical biopic, exactly your typical biopic, and a surreal contradiction all at the same time.
While it’s true that a North Korean State TV-produced biopic of Kim Il-Sung could scarcely have been more hagiographic than Reagan, in this day and age, those kinds of biopics are a dime a dozen. We have image management exercises masquerading as biopics about every level of public figure these days, from the band Queen to the guy who invented Air Jordans to Serena Williams’ dad — most of them produced with the full cooperation of the subjects or the subjects’ estates.
The fascinating thing about watching Reagan (okay, “fascinating” might be a stretch) is trying to anticipate which events of Ronald Reagan’s life it will explore and which it will gloss over. Most times, I got it all wrong.
During the Red Scare, for instance, when so many prominent people in Hollywood lost careers over dubious connections to the Communist Party, one of the greatest sins to left-leaning people was having “named names,” throwing friends under the bus to satisfy the mob. During this time, Reagan didn’t just name names, he gave the FBI a list, becoming a sort of tattle-taler in chief, the blacklists paving his path to prominence.
Rather than elide Reagan’s part in this witch hunt, the movie says, in essence, that witches were real, and it’s only thanks in part to Ronnie that we weren’t overrun with them. In an opening crawl, Reagan straightforwardly suggests Robert Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent. Later, Quaid’s Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, battles rival union boss Herb Sorrel (played by Martin Kubr), another communist, we’re told, depicted here as a Hoffa-esque, cigar chomping villain who actually pulls a gun on Ronnie in a street battle to turn Hollywood red. Then there’s mincing pinko Dalton Trumbo (played by Sean Hankinson) who Dutch bravely confonts at a dinner party after Trumbo lisps something about the American Dream no longer being a reality for most people. We’re meant to identify with Reagan here, trying to lure a famous screenwriter into incriminating himself.
Rather than gloss over these seemingly embarrassing episodes, the movie simply repositions reality, depicting them as straightforward moments of Reagan heroism. Meanwhile, of Ronald Reagan’s five children, the one who gets the most screen time is Christine, who died at one day old in 1947, and is depicted in the form of a comically CGI’d gravestone, rendered in unconvincing, Comic Sans-adjacent font. The graphic design is comedic perfection, I really wish I had the screencap to share. In any case, it seems the only reason she’s mentioned at all is to provide the narrative justification for Reagan’s 1948 divorce to Jane Wyman, played by Mena Suvari from American Pie. After that, basically all reference to the Reagan children disappears.
Reagan smacks of all the surviving Reagan children having either opted not to participate, demanded to be left out, or the producers just having figured that the Reagan kids were a whole can of worms better left unopened. The effect is strange, a soft focus puff piece about the world’s ultimate family man whose actual family exists invisibly offscreen. True, Nancy is there, played haltingly by Penelope Anne Miller in the film’s second strangest performance, landing somewhere between Disneyland animatronic and shell-shocked WWI vet. She’s meant to fulfill the function of Ronnie’s biggest supporter and confidant, but she’s so awed by him from their first meeting on that she just seems kind of permanently startled. Meanwhile, Kevin Dillon from Entourage plays Jack Warner and culture war movie perennial Robert Davi shows up as Leonid Brezhnev. At times, Reagan comes tantalizingly close to ironic perfection.
None of this is to say that Reagan doesn’t have its traditional, predictable biopic elements, which make up some of its best moments. When Jane Wyman (Suvari) drunkenly challenges Ronnie, “are you an actor, Ronnie, or a politician??” I couldn’t help but imagine a stereotypical biopic mom screaming “Gaul dangit, Ronnie! How many times I hafta tell you! Ain’t NO POLITICS gonna put NO FOOD on NO TABLE!”
Reagan’s big climax, as you might imagine, is when he gives his famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, which is preceded by at least 10 minutes of buildup, during which various characters, from speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher (Derek Richardson) to Secretary of State George Schultz (Nick Searcy) argue over whether he should say it. When he finally does, it’s treated to a chorus of reaction shots, from cheering East Germans, listening on the speakers of their Lada, to Margaret Thatcher (Lesley Anne-Down), who, watching on television in her parlor, says “Good show, Cowboy,” in her dinner theater My Fair Lady accent before taking a satisfied sip of tea.
When Reagan shows up to the famous photo op alongside Gorbachev, during which Gorby wore a big winter coat and Reagan arrived in a simple suit jacket (a landmark moment in Reagan lore), Reagan depicts a Kremlin functionary watching it on live TV, muttering “…Checkmate.”
Those are Reagan’s trailer moments, which you probably could’ve imagined. Much of it, however, is some combination of inept and baffling. Reagan receives his calling to run for the presidency during a dinner party attended by Nancy, the singer Pat Boone, and pastor George Otis, with both Boone and Otis identified by chyron, alongside a third guy whose identity is never revealed but who looks an awful lot like Jerry Falwell. Were they trying to inspire some fan theories?
I should also note that the entire story is framed around the fictional composite character Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent played by Jon Voight (himself a prominent Republican who looks enough like Anthony Hopkins that Donald Trump may have confused the two of them, leading to his ongoing “late great Hannibal Lecter” bit) advising a young Russian politician in the present day on why Russia’s last attempt at empire failed. The younger Russian politician seeking Petrovich’s counsel, curiously, doesn’t seem intended to be Vladimir Putin (the actor playing him is tall and with a full head of hair). Maybe he’s meant to be Dmitry Medvedev, but probably that’s giving Reagan too much credit. The rub, which Reagan only gets to after two hours and 15 minutes of screen time, is that the Soviet Union failed because they forsook God, while Reagan, whom the Russian-accented Voight refers to as “The Crusader” throughout the film, beat them because he invoked God at every turn.
The part where Putin wrapped himself in the trappings of the Russian Orthodox Church to rule a mafia state is left unsaid, one of many moments in Reagan that made me feel like the goose meme, chasing the story around the theater honking “AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED???”
Such as when Ronald Reagan convinces Margaret Thatcher that she should stop spending British money for Soviet oil, which, Ronnie explains, she knows deep down is just going to finance more Soviet missiles (that the USSR had more missiles than the US is, like Hollywood’s red menace, another old myth that Reagan treats as self-evident fact). Instead, he suggests, she should just buy it from those nice folks in Saudi Arabia, who famously spent a lot of the intervening years exporting a particularly intolerant form of fundamentalist Islam and, inasmuch as any one person or entity can be blamed for it, went on to do 9/11. If this was intended to be an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, the movie gives no indication of it.
This is Reagan’s ideology in a nutshell: of coming face to face with complex societal and historical problems and “solving” them with a wink and a folksy story. “Herb Sorrell?” Quaid’s Reagan croaks. “We used ta call ‘im ‘Herb Sore as Hell.’ He hated that.” (wink).
When movie Reagan, as governor of California, comes to put down a student protest at the University of California in 1969, movie Ed Meese explains, “They don’t even know why they’re protesting. They’re doing it just to do it.”
In 1969? At the height of the Vietnam War, with people their age getting drafted to go fight a war in the jungle? They were “doing it just to do it?”
But movie Ronnie correctly surmises that what these kids really need is some better parenting. So he shows up, does a few bits, and acts like the firm father these kids never had and the whole thing calms down (with help from the National Guard).
Of course, to me, Reagan is one of the biggest villains of the 20th century, responsible for so many problems my generation ended up with, from rampant homelessness (by deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill) to the student debt crisis (tuition at the UCs, one of which I graduated from, was free before Reagan, who cut their funding specifically because he thought they were too liberal), not to mention all of the civilians in the developing world his policies helped to kill.
This is part of the Reaganism strategy: say folksy shit about how horses are nice and hippies are stinky and make everyone who disagrees with you sound like know-it-all schoolmarms. Those rightwing death squads Reagan funded in Central America? They were just plucky underdogs, and anyway, Ronnie apologized for not telling congress about that. (Another Reagan low point reimagined in the movie as a triumph of Godly integrity).