I strolled into an early Friday afternoon showing of Reagan (2024). The viewership in the Georgetown AMC was wanting: the theater, even with the matinee discount, was populated by my person and an elderly couple that walked in just at the end of the trailers before the movie started.
Granted, Reagan presents a historically contentious narrative, namely that the Soviet Union was brought down by the dynamism of one true American: Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quad). This is propaganda, but I’ll hold my breath: a lot of things are.
The film begins with Reagan surviving an assassination attempt but quickly transports the audience back in time—as traditional biopics tend to do—to Reagan’s formative years. We meet a young Reagan, his alcoholic father Jack Reagan (Jack Chatwin), and his compassionate, devout mother, Nelle Clyde Wilson (Amanda Righetti). From the film’s inception, its creative direction attempts to present Reagan with an inherent relatability. The audience is presented with the possible origins of one of the future President’s most prominent qualities, his affable charisma, which he might have absorbed in spectating his father’s immersion of bar crowds: A young Reagan walks into the local pub searching for his father, where he finds an audience entranced by his father’s exceptional rowdiness, storytelling acumen, and charismatic humor. In spite of his father’s perceived affability, we soon see young Reagan dragging his drunk father inside the house from the snowy steps of their home. His mother, Nelle, sympathetically looks out for his development through this instability, and this chapter of the film is wrapped with Nelle’s exhortation to young Reagan: “God has a purpose for your life. Something only you can do.” This messianic sense of purpose becomes a thread of inevitability that weaves the film together, from Hollywood to the oval office.
While the film’s thematic direction is well thought out, it is to its detriment. One of the film’s major fault is its decision to have Reagan’s life story told through a conversation between a caricature of a young and “up-and-coming,” Russian politician in present-day Russia, who inquires sorrowfully of retired KGB Agent Viktor Petrovich—who handled Reagan’s file as an anti-Communist subject of interest—about the fall of the Soviet motherland. The film peddles the argument that battle-stricken old man Petrovich foresaw the existential, annihilatory danger that Reagan would bring upon the Soviet Union. With no historical rooting, the director subtly raises Reagan to the ranks of the Olympian gods: an unbridled force of nature imminently subduing any mortal that dares to step in their willful path.
It is evident that historical change is complex with countless factors—social, economic, political, ideological, cultural, individual—affecting that change. The reality of the Soviet Union is not exempt to this nuance. This is not to discredit any role that Reagan had in weakening the Soviet Union, but to outright reject the argument that the film propagates: that Reagan was the coup de grâce, the prime mover, and the end all be all when it came to the finale of the Soviet Union. In reality, that he was not.
The movie trades in prejudiced, Balkanist representations of the Soviets: successive Soviet premiers are seen indulging their petty alcoholism in the Kremlin’s conference room, as the Americans—industrious and active, headed by Reagan—were tightening their strategic chokehold on the East and pulling the Soviet state from under the premiers’ legs. While it is on-brand for modern America’s brand of conservatism, its portrayal reeks of propaganda.
Other than the film’s questionable storytelling, at the beginning of the film, Quaid’s portrayal of Reagan comes off stiff and robotic, with a glued face and nauseated microexpression. However, Quaid is quick to recover, embodying the peerless wit and seamless charm that the former president is known for. By the middle of the movie, Quaid is engrossing as Reagan in all his manifestations, be they the handsome and principled young Hollywood actor, the devoted husband, or the cowboy—the American’s American.
While Quaid’s portrayal of Reagan presents him as a larger-than-life individual, his presidency is scarcely remembered without his wife, Nancy, who was voted as the most admirable woman in the world for three different years by the American public in an annual Gallup poll. Audiencegoers meet Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller) after Reagan’s failed marriage and his dwindling movie career. After Reagan helps Nancy sort out a standard case of mixed identity with a communist sympathizer, Reagan invites Nancy to go horseback riding. In the crisp air of the Californian Hills, she tells Reagan that she accepts him as he is, regardless of his self-perceived limitations. They kiss passionately. In more than one scene, we see Nancy’s hands firmly, almost forcefully, clasping the back of Ronald’s head: a passionate and strong woman who deeply loves her husband and is not only invested in his happiness, but is an active contributor to it. This is the image we get of Nancy Reagan and the film centers this narrative within the wider Reagan anti-Communist crusade.
The film’s characterization of Reagan and Nancy is not the only aspect that showcases the story’s basis in mythology. Reagan’s entire presidency is foretold by a zealous prophecy. Earlier in the movie, a pastor predicts Reagan’s presidency on the condition that Reagan “walks uprightly” before God. Reagan fulfills his prophecy set before him as he fiercely resists the Soviets, and climatically, and as ever so charmingly retorts the famous words, ”Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He is positioned to be unlike any of his predecessors While the movie does show the fatigue and confusion that became part of Reagan’s presidency in his second term—he was the oldest person ever to assume the presidency at that time—73-year-old–Reagan accepts these infirmities gracefully. The movie is attempting to paint Reagan as unlike some other, more recent aged presidents and has him ride away into the Californian horizon as a hero.
Despite the film’s attempts at glory, it received an 18% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 98% from audience reviews. While the gap is jarring at first, it can be assumed that a major part of the film’s audience belongs to the ideological target audience that the film had in mind: devout, involved, active Republicans. Other audiences may be less inclined to attend a showing, lacking the Reagan idolization tendency of the American Republican party. But perhaps there is an older, less politically-inclined, and probably White, audience who have positive sentiments about Reagan’s presidency and who might gain some catharsis from mourning the days when America was ‘doing fine.’ For that audience, Reagan showcases the time when enmity was not the law of the land. This, of course, is a specific version of history tailored towards a certain type of audience; this utopia was generally not the case for a great portion of the American populace, especially minorities.
This is not a great movie. I would suggest it to my friend Will—a historian, a wide-ranging movie enjoyer—as an exercise in investigating partisan media at best. I would not consider this a great, or even mediocre, work of art. Knowingly or unknowingly, the film parodies itself through tired tropes that are not well received by critical audiences. The film unconvincingly attempts richer cultural commentary on Russian history and spirit by asserting that it lies in Tolstoy, Turgev, and Checkov—plentiful artists and sages sanctioned for Western consumption hung in frames in Petrovich’s cozy Russian home—and not in godless American enemies Lenin and Stalin. But it is too derivative. Nuance is not even an afterthought, genuinely nor performatively.
Reagan is an exercise in idolatry, in a politically fervent and particularly partisan decade. The movie has its acceptable moments of storytelling: one cannot help but feel impressed by Reagan’s journey of overcoming and Quaid and Miller’s performances. But, these moments are not enough to make up for the breached hull that the movie embarks with. We are sinking in conservative fantasy shortly after departure and it reeks of disingenuity.
