'Reagan' Review

A movie isn't good simply because you like its subject.

I’m not going to beat around the bush: Reagan is not a good movie.

Hagiography rarely makes for a great film, and Reagan is pure hagiography. Ronald Reagan is portrayed as a man with few (if any) flaws, a true “Crusader” (as the film calls him several times) against the godless commies. To make matters worse, Reagan falls into the biopic trap of attempting to tell an entire life story in a two-hour film, following Reagan from childhood through his time in Hollywood, his political career, his presidency, and to the brink of his battle with Alzheimer’s disease. It is simply too much to cram into one film. And a medium notoriously dependent (in America, anyway) on the three-act story structure is rarely going to be able to capture the complexity of an entire human life. It also introduces a lot of characters from Reagan’s administration who do not really make a lot of difference to the plot. Perhaps this was a way to thank these people or their families for their cooperation in the making of the film? If so, it was a nice gesture, but further bloated an already over-stuffed film.

To make matters worse, Reagan is also trying to be a typical Christian movie, chock full of Bible verses, wise advice from pastors, and preachy messages shoehorned into many of the scenes. Reagan commits to making a film in perhaps the three most mocked film genres of the modern age, and no amount of blustering about the hatred of Hollywood liberals will cover up the fact that the filmmakers made many bad choices about how to tell Ronald Reagan’s story.

From a technical standpoint the film is generally competent, although it does make some bizarre choices at times. The cinematography is fine and undistracting, although any time a truly inspired looking shot occured, it was invariably a recreation of a real photo of Reagan. The original score was pretty good, but the pop songs chosen to punctuate important moments ranged from obvious choices (Frank Sinatra’s This Town when Reagan is in Las Vegas) to anachronistic (1944 Oscar-Winning original song Swingin’ on a Star sung at a nightclub in 1941) to utterly strange (John Denver’s Country Roads played as Reagan takes his last horse ride through…the coastline of California? Oh well, it got my West Virginia theater all singing along). The film also heavily uses de-aging effects for three of its main characters: Dennis Quaid’s Ronald Reagan, Penelope Ann Miller’s Nancy Reagan, and Jon Voight’s Viktor Novikov. Miller generally looks pretty good; Quaid is a little plastic, but not distracting; Voight looks like a PlayStation3 character. Other visual effects throughout the movie are sometimes laughably bad, giving the film an amateurish look that will simply confirm liberal bias that conservatives are incapable of making a good movie.

There are a few good things about the movie that it would be churlish of me to omit. The acting, in particular, is excellent. Dennis Quaid plays a very good Reagan. He never melts into the role like some other biopic actors, but he does the voice very well and portrays Reagan’s charm and inner fire wonderfully. Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan is sweet and endearing (although perhaps a little too much the perfect tradwife), and the two actors playing younger Reagan, Tommy Ragen and especially David Henrie, are effective and memorable in their short roles. The various world figures Reagan interacts with are well-portrayed, if a bit caricatured, and contribute well to the general recreation of the time period that the film is attempting. The film also does a great job at recreating certain iconic Reagan moments and photographs. Indeed, one might say that as long as they were simply recreating, they made a fine movie; it was when they had to be original that they failed.

There is not much more to say about Reagan; it simply is not a good film. It will appeal to one main demographic: aging conservatives desperate to relive their glory days and see their hero’s iconic moments recreated on the big screen. It’s a twenty-one gun salute to the last of the Cold Warriors, and as such it is hard for me to muster too much ire at it. However, it does break my heart to see conservative media herald this as a great work of cinema, especially those who actually know a good movie when they see one. Sometimes a movie needs to be criticized even when its heart is in the right place, even when it is on your side of the social or political aisle. If conservatives and Christians do not demand better cinema, this will continue to be the best we get. And I, for one, will not stand for it.