"Reagan": review

Dennis Quaid as Ronald Wilson Reagan* at the Berlin Wall, with Brandenburg Gate in the background

The 2024 biopic "Reagan" stars Dennis Quaid in the title role as the Gipper himself, a.k.a. Dutch in his younger days. The film was directed by Sean McNamara; the screenplay is credited to Howard Klausner, and it's apparently based on a particular Reagan biography titled The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. The film has what is considered the largest-ever enthusiasm gap on Rotten Tomatoes: an 18% score from professional critics (all of whom are lefties, of course) and an audience score (now called the Popcornmeter) of 98%. Having now seen the movie, I can safely say that neither extreme is justified. "Reagan" is, as biopics go, a plodding and ponderous film whose through-line is a conversation in Russia between young and ambitious Russian politician Andrei Novikov and aging ex-Soviet KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight). Their conversation, taking place in the 2020s ("the present"), drives the flashback narrative that takes us from Reagan's formative years through his presidency and to his final years with Alzheimer's.

Young Novikov (Alex Sparrow) has visited several older statesmen to ask them why the Soviet Union fell as it did, and largely without a fight against its mortal enemy, the United States. He hasn't gotten a satisfactory answer from anyone, which is why he turns at last to Petrovich. Petrovich (not entirely fictional: the trivia is that he is a composite of several real KGB agents who had followed and studied Reagan and his life closely) offers a lengthy explanation of the life and thoughts of Ronald Reagan, a man that Petrovich suspected early on of becoming a major problem for the USSR.

The story takes us from Reagan's youth, when he was dealing with a drunkard of a father and a mother who instilled religious values in him while also encouraging him to get into public speaking, a skill Reagan began to use to some effect in church and other places. Reagan learns to face bullies, a moral lesson he'll apply when he gets into politics. We see some of "Dutch" during his lifeguard years, young and strong and svelte, with some girls faking drowning just to be rescued by him. Reagan eventually gets into acting, meets and marries Jane Wyman (Mina Suvari), and becomes the head of the Screen Actors Guild. With communism on the rise in the US as Russian agents infiltrate the culture, Reagan becomes an FBI informant; he and Jane lose her daughter Christine, and Jane divorces Ronald, partly from the stress of that loss and partly from her disagreement with his political activism.

Ronald eventually meets and marries actress Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), and much of the movie is about how the two support each other. No mention is made of Nancy's weird penchant for astrology (Ron was a born-again Christian, so one wonders what sort of conflicts of belief might have simmered in the Reagan household, even though Reagan himself is shown entranced by one Protestant minister's sudden prophecy that the presidency will be Reagan's if he walks the straight** and narrow path, i.e., he himself wasn't immune to magical thinking). Ronald eventually accedes to the presidency after failing against Gerald Ford. He does beat Jimmy Carter, though, and the famous "There you go again" debate line is depicted. (Later, while debating Walter Mondale, Reagan's joke about Mondale's relative youth and inexperience is also included.) Reagan deals with the Soviet threat, finding help from both Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. Reagan survives his assassination attempt; the pope survives his, and the two form a connection thereby. And help comes, strangely, from another corner: the Soviet Union itself, in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev, who takes over after a series of Soviet leaders, from Brezhnev onward, dies one after another. Reagan deals with Gorbachev through a mixture of personal conversations and obstinacy after stating goals and desired results. Eventually, we see the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech, and not long after that, the Soviet Union is no more. Reagan retires to his ranch after his second term, and after announcing to the public that he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He goes riding with a particular Secret Service agent until his mind deteriorates to the point where he can no longer ride without getting lost. Reagan eventually dies in 2004; world leaders, including Thatcher and Gorbachev, attend his funeral.

How much you end up liking "Reagan" depends at least in part upon your politics. If you're a leftie, and you've done your homework, you'll recognize quite a few conservative actors in the cast: Dennis Quaid most prominently, but also Robert Davi as Brezhnev and Jon Voight as Petrovich among others. Your appreciation for the movie will also depend on what you think of Dennis Quaid's sustained Reagan impression. The movie was made on a relatively small budget, so there was no digital de-aging of Quaid involved. Instead, Quaid's looks, as the adult Reagan, remain more or less the same over the decades, with some small tweaks in terms of facial wrinkles, clothing fashions, and mental acuity. Quaid himself is 70. Overall, he captures Reagan's most prominent and parodied mannerisms well (including Reagan's sentence-opener "Well..."), and without falling into parody himself.

But also if you're a leftie, you'll note that the movie breezes by or papers over Reagan's flaws in terms of how he managed the US budget and national debt, the Iran-contra affair (Reagan is painted as having had the best of intentions, but his guilt or innocence is left unexplored and ambiguous), and other incidents. No mention is made of biological son Ron Reagan Jr., a die-hard liberal, or of his adopted son Michael Reagan, who has been in legal trouble several times. The biopic will be seen by liberals as, at best, a superficial and heavily edited hagiography for an undeserving president; righties, by contrast, will read the movie as a proper tribute to a great and honorable man.

For me, the movie's slow pacing and bland dialogue were the main problems; they were also the reason I would give the film neither an 18% nor a 98%. "Reagan" sits somewhere in the boring middle. If anything, it's a bit of a snoozer, especially with a run time of 140 minutes. The one thing that does come through, though, is the love that Ronald and Nancy had for each other; during the ending credits, real video footage is run, including the painful moment when Nancy has the chance, at her husband's funeral, to lean over his coffin and say her quiet, sad goodbyes. I'd never had much sympathy, or much feeling at all, for Nancy Reagan, but that moment hit me pretty deeply. It humanized her in a way that even Penelope Ann Miller's performance did not.

I can only imagine that the entire cast and crew had been warned that the biopic would receive a lot of hatred, especially given its release during a crucial election year for Donald Trump. Some of the movie's dialogue was obviously aimed at current audiences, too, suggesting that, as they say, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. The 18%/98% split on Rotten Tomatoes may partially be thanks to both positive and negative review-bombing by people who either watched only part of the film or never watched it at all. I think that, as made, "Reagan" would serve better as a made-for-TV movie. Among its best moments, aside from the Ron/Nancy situations, were Reagan's friendship/rivalry with Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill (played by Dan Lauria, whom I immediately liked but didn't recognize at first; he was the dad in "The Wonder Years"), and Reagan's exchanges with Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa). Margaret Thatcher (Lesley-Ann Down) gets one or two moments, but disappointingly, she doesn't figure too greatly in the overall picture.

Overall, I'd recommend "Reagan" to the faithful, to the conservatives who see the man as a great president (my conservative buddy Mike has a photo of himself shaking Reagan's hand). To the doubters, I would say, Skip this. It's not worth your time. Quaid does an impressive job inhabiting the Gipper, and the framing story with the two Russians provides enough of a cosmic perspective to help us toward a particular understanding of Reagan's significance on the world stage; Reagan became the template, I think, for Republican presidents who did much more abroad than they ever did at home; Donald Trump is lauded by his faithful for his foreign-policy coups, many significantly undone by Joe Biden, but Trump's primary focus, like that of any Clinton-era Democrat, has mostly been on his America First policy and the rehabilitation of the American worker. It could be that, as Trump reconfigures the Republican party, he is slowly erasing Ronald Reagan's legacy. Only history can answer that question for sure, but what's also sure is that the judgment of history is itself always changing.

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*Enemies of Ronald Wilson Reagan noted that each of his names had six letters: 6-6-6. This notion of equating every Republican to Hitler and/or Satan goes back a ways.

**The biblical verse in question (KJV) uses strait, not straight: Matthew 7:13-14: Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. But both Webster and Dictionary.com say that the modern phrase is the straight and narrow. Language often changes through misuse and misunderstandings. Pretty soon, "AFFER-mentioned," currently a mispronunciation, will be considered an acceptable pronunciation of aforementioned.