Ronald Reagan’s legacy is currently in a precarious place. The left abhors him and believes almost all of our country’s current problems stem from his presidential administration. And while once emphatically lionized by the right, Reagan has become increasingly irrelevant to the GOP as it becomes more consumed by Trumpism and more opposed to the neoliberalism that defined his administration. It seems like nobody loves Ronald Reagan anymore. Therefore, the stakes couldn’t be higher for the recently released Reagan biopic “Reagan.” Can it reignite this country’s love for Reagan? Can it remind generations old and young alike why he is so awesome?
After seeing the film, I can confidently say it utterly failed to do any of this. While a stereotypical biopic in many ways, “Reagan” has a somewhat unique framing device. The film unfolds from the perspective of a retired KGB agent, Viktor Petrovich, played by Jon Voight in a very silly Russian accent. Petrovich recounts Reagan’s entire life to a young Russian politician to explain how the Soviet Union collapsed. This structure quickly reveals the film’s primary focus: Reagan’s fight against communism.
Anti-communism is the driving force of the entire movie. All of Reagan’s life is examined through the prism of his vicious hatred of communism and how he unwaveringly railed against it throughout his whole life. And yes, while anti-communism is a crucial aspect of Reagan’s career, this monomania is a disservice to his prolific life and makes for a boring film. The film is not interested in dissecting Reagan’s interiority, examining how he both reflected and refracted American culture or exploring the impact of his domestic policies such as Reaganomics instead. The film is preoccupied with arguing he was a saintly, flawless man who heroically defeated the Soviet Union (it even suggests that God specially blessed Reagan to become president and destroy communism). But even then, it doesn’t do a good job at this. The film’s banal rants against communism are unmoving, and its attempts to portray Reagan’s foreign policy with the Soviet Union as some political masterclass are unconvincing. It’s all maddeningly dull. There’s even a very self-conscious scene that feels like the screenwriter trying to justify the film’s obsession with communism. Someone asks Reagan if he can start discussing domestic policy instead of communism, to which Reagan angrily replies no because communism is an existential threat to our domestic life. I giggled.
The filmmaking ranges from amateurish to serviceable. Some scenes have awful editing and awkward compositions, but most of the time the movie is competently crafted. The film’s strongest formal element is it's production design, even though the directing sometimes obscures it. Dennis Quaid's central performance as Reagan is decent. I hate Reagan’s voice — it always sounds tepid and congested — and Quaid sadly does a good job recreating it, which made the two-hour-plus runtime an absolute joy for me. The script does not give Quaid much to work with, but he convincingly assumes the role. Conversely, I found Penelope Ann Miller’s performance as Nancy Reagan sloppy and obnoxious. It felt like she was always reaching for emotions she couldn’t entirely sell, especially during the scene where she tries to convince Reagan to more aggressively defend himself during the Iran-Contra affair, one of the only controversies of his career the film chose to mention.
“Reagan” is a cowardly, vacuous mess. Devoid of any critical commentary or analysis of Reagan, the film is a cloying highlight reel where the highlights are not highlights but rather vague gestures towards highlights. If you’re going to make a hagiography of Ronald Reagan, at least make it good.
