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REAGAN
Director: Sean McNamara Cast: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight, Xander Berkeley, Aleksander Krupa, Mena Suvari, Lesley-Anne Down, Dan Lauria, Kevin Dillon, Mark Moses MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:20 Release Date: 8/30/24 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2024 Reagan starts getting at something fascinating about 40th President of the United States, as the acting career of Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid) diminishes to the point that he's doing a lounge act in Las Vegas and selling any product he can in TV ads. What's a man whose time on the silver screen has passed him by to do? There's always politics, a realm in which a pleasant smile and some firm opinion stated with some degree of conviction can get a person far. It got Reagan into the White House, after all. Such a basic level of even mild cynicism about politics and politicians would, of course, require a minor bit of skepticism about this movie's subject. Whether or not the makers of this fawning biography are cynical or skeptical about politics when it comes to other matters is irrelevant. When it comes to Reagan, they are unabashedly in all the way for the man, his career, his time in office, his politics, and his legacy. That the movie has to go out of its way to maintain that perspective is a given. No human being is perfect, and no politician, no matter how admired, has a perfect track record. People will differ, obviously, on what and how much was wrong with Reagan's presidency, but when this movie refers to the Iran-Contra affair as a meager "domestic scandal," it becomes apparent that screenwriter Howard Klausner (adapting Paul Kengor's book) has no interest in finding any possible critique of the man, his politics, his policies, or how he ran his administration. More than that, the Reagan of director Sean McNamara's movie is the equivalent of an American saint—a man who in one scene is literally prophesized to take the then-unlikely path from B-movie actor to President. One could make an inspiring story about the basic idea of that seemingly improbable career course, but no, the filmmakers here feel obliged to elevate it to some sort of holy destiny. Watching Reagan navigate the uncharted terrain of politics without any real experience or firm set of policies might have made for an interesting story. Watching the man just sort of fall into the field, with the suggestion that some higher power wanted it that way, is simply dull storytelling. That's the most significant issue with this movie: It is simply an act of dull storytelling. It's unnecessarily convoluted and frustratingly simplistic, too. The narrative begins with Reagan being shot in 1981, with some folks speculating that the assassination attempt might have been planned by the Soviet Union. The opening credits take us through the highlights of the Cold War, before finally landing upon a curious framing device. He's Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight), a former KGB analyst who tells Reagan's story to a young true-believer at some point after the fall of the USSR. From there, the narrative is a mess, jumping back to Reagan's Hollywood career before giving us a flashback-within-a-flashback to his childhood, time in college, and right back to movie-stardom. Apart from Reagan, the other main character here is the broad concept of Soviet-style Communism, which hovers like a specter over every event. The whole movie is steeped in Cold War-era paranoia—and sincerely so. Some of that makes sense within the story, since it eventually focuses on Reagan's efforts to make peace and arrange nuclear disarmament with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa), but it takes that attitude to an extreme. Every negative turn—from Reagan's days in the actors' union, to his shooting, to assorted other bits of history—is cloaked in the aura of conspiracy. Sure, Reagan wasn't shot by a Soviet infiltrator, but as Viktor—a character who mainly seems to exist to give some credence to these notions—points out, he could have been. This is story is so obsessed with looking for real or imagined villains that it rushes through the biographical elements and anything else of note, especially anything of questionable effect, about Reagan's administration. His marriage to Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller) is meant to be the emotional crux of the epilogue, but she's reduced to the blandly supportive wife here. Other policies are mentioned (His economic theory gets a jokey monologue, which is appropriate in some ways) and quickly ignored, as the story pushes down one track without any interest in looking back, around, or forward. The result is a shallow biography and a hollow piece of political drama. Reagan was made only for the loyalists, but unintentionally, it might be the movie the man deserves. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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