My seventy-five-year-old father doesn’t get out to see as many movies as he used to, but one he was dead-set on seeing in theaters was Reagan. My sister took him and he came back singing the movie’s praises, celebrating Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of the 40th president of the U.S. of A. and extolling the virtues of this trip down Boomer memory lane. I’m glad my father enjoyed the movie. I’m glad the filmmakers could provide him two hours of uplift and entertainment, especially during times like these where my whole family can use the escape from present-day worries. I’m also retroactively relieved that I didn’t see the movie with him, though as a dutiful son and his movie buddy for decades, I would have. I’m glad because our opinions on the overall artistic merits would have been significantly different, and I wouldn’t want to rain on my father’s personal enjoyment (that’s what the written word is for).

For the benefit of analyzing Reagan as a movie first and foremost, I’ll reserve my reservations about his political legacy for the end of the review, but even as a standard presidential biography, Reagan the movie is a disappointing and reductive trip through one man’s Wikipedia summation of a career. I’ve become much more a fan of the biographies that choose a seminal moment from a public figure’s life to use as a framing device for the larger legacy (think 2012’s Lincoln focusing on the passage of the thirteenth amendment). I’d prefer that approach to the more familiar cradle-to-grave structure that often feels like a zoom through their greatest hits where none of the events are granted the consideration or nuance deserved. With Reagan the movie, we’re sprinting through history, although Reagan doesn’t even become president until an hour in. Instead, the focus is unilaterally on Reagan’s opposition to communism and the Soviets. Obviously distilling eight years of a presidency into a couple hours is a daunting and improbable task, the same difficulty for distilling any person’s complicated life into an accessible two hours of narrative. Still, you should have expected more.

For those coming into the movie looking for a critical eye, or an even-handed approach to this man’s faults and accomplishments, the movie condenses itself into a narrow examination on communism and the Cold War, a story we already know proves triumphant. The cumulative problem with Reagan the movie is that it doesn’t really add to a deeper understanding of the man. With its streamlined narrative and pacing, the movie sticks to its Greatest Hits of Reagan, especially his speeches. There are several famous Reagan speeches littered throughout the last act of the movie, and it doesn’t do much for a better understanding of the man delivering those remarks as just hitting upon people’s memories of the man in public venues. It would be more insightful to watch the team behind the scenes debating their choices. The movie portrays Reagan the man more like Saint Regan, arguing if there are any presentable faults they should be readily forgiven because it was all in pursuit of morally impregnable goals (he remarks that the vicious right-wing contras remind him of George Washington and the early colonial army…. yeah, sure). The filmmakers are too afraid to say anything too critical but also to reveal anything truly revelatory about their subject. So the movie becomes a glossy nostalgic-heavy drama without much in the way of drama because Reagan will always persevere through whatever hardships thanks to the power of his convictions, which will always be proven right no matter the context and repercussions. The movie seems to imply all his decisions led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it all must have worked out, right? Well, not for everybody, movie, but we’ll get to that in due time.

The filmmakers elect to frame the movie through a curious narrator – a retired KGB officer (Jon Voight) that has followed the life and times of Ronald Reagan going back to his early days. Apparently, this Soviet spy saw true greatness in Reagan way back and thought he might become a threat to the continuation of communism. It’s a strange perspective to be locked into, the enemy complimenting Reagan from afar and ultimately crediting the man’s faith in God as the reason that America triumphed over the Soviets. It means then that every scene has to be linked to our KGB narrator, and sometimes that can get questionable, like when he’s talking about Reagan’s time as a teenage lifeguard, or the time Reagan was being bullied by local kids, or Regan’s intimate conversations with his first wife, Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari). The scenes in Hollywood are so clunky, especially a dinner where the movie wants us to look down on Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted Hollywood Ten writer. This man stood for his principles and suffered a real backlash, and you want me to think of him as misguided and part of some liberal communist cabal (the movie also includes a picture of Oppenheimer as part of its Soviet influence targets)? By insisting upon a narrator that’s not Reagan, that means this KGB spy it also means that we’re seeing the world of Ronald Reagan through an interpreter’s prism, which makes the scenes even more curious for being such an unexpected cheerleader over Reagan’s amazing instincts and abilities. It would be like having Stalin narrate a biopic about FDR and showering the president with gushing praise.

Limiting the movie’s focus to Reagan’s lifelong battle against communist forces makes for a much cleaner and more triumphant narrative, and also leads to an ending we all know is coming, not that surprise or nuance is what the primary audience is looking for. The movie posits that Reagan pursued becoming the country’s chief executive for the selfless mission of standing up to the nefarious forces of communism. Then again, in the opening moments, the movie also tacitly implies that maybe it was the Russians who shot him back in 1981 when it was really an incel who thought he might impress Jodie Foster. Those opening moments also present a cliffhanger to come back to, as if there’s a gullible portion of the audience that is hanging on pins and needles in anticipation whether or not Reagan really was killed back in 1981 (“But… but if Ronnie dies, then who was left to beat the commies?”). It’s a very selective narrative framing that makes the movie easy to celebrate because Reagan is presented as America’s steadfast defender who stood up for our apple-pie American values and brought down the Soviets. Reagan certainly played his part in helping to facilitate the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he was one man coming in at the end of a chain of events spanning decades. I liken it to having a group project in school where you and your cohorts work steadily all week, and then the day it’s due, a kid who’s been absent all week except for that day comes onto the project, adds some contributions, and then takes credit for everything accomplished. Reagan gets his due but so do the other U.S, presidents, secretaries of state, and lots and lots of ambassadors that also helped reach this monumental conclusion. However, the biggest contributor to the collapse of the Soviet Union belongs to the Soviets themselves and their rejection of living in a reality in conflict with the dogma of their political leaders (sound familiar to anyone?).

The screenwriters also position the Great Communicator as being so powerfully persuasive that all it took was one speech and everyone was left helplessly in thrall of this man’s honeyed words. It takes on such a grandiose scale that makes Reagan look like a superhuman. The movie sets up its climax over whether or not Reagan will say “tear down this wall” in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, which heightens the drama to a level of self-parody. Is there any spectator wondering if Reagan will eventually say the words that became famous? Beyond the false drama of whether or not Reagan will utter this phrase, the movie tries to fashion some unconvincing behind-the-scenes hand-wringing over what it will mean if Reagan says these words while in Germany. As if the man has ever been shy about denouncing communism and the Soviet state beforehand. The movie also exists in a world where every world leader and responsible adult is glued to a TV set watching Reagan speechify at any key moment. Hilariously, after Reagan does indeed say “tear down this wall,” the film cuts to Margaret Thatcher watching and solemnly saying, “Well done, cowboy.” The rousing music reaches a crescendo, the Reagan team celebrates like they just landed a man on the moon, and the implication is that now that Reagan has put these four words together in sequence, well that Gorbachev fella has no choice now. The movie is set up like this speech is the final blow that pushes the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history. And yet, the next scene of the Berlin Wall coming down has a helpful on-screen designation of time: “two years later.” So Ronnie gave his amazing speech and it immediately led to the end of East Germany… two years later. Does George H. W. Bush get all the credit for being president when the Soviet Union actually collapsed in 1991? I’m sure we can find a speech somewhere where he said something bad about them, and if Reagan the movie is an indication about political persuasion, all he had to do was say the words out loud. Then the wicked communist curse is broken, but few people knew that, only those who worked for Ronnie.

The movie goes to this magical solution time and again, as Reagan is able to solve any crisis with just the right combination of words. Whether it’s Vietnam protestors he cows into retreat by shushing them, or even a debate where all he has to do is throw out a joke and the opposition must crumble because nobody can recover in the face of a joke; the movie presents time and again a silly and reductive version of politics where all it takes is for people to hear the cherished words of Saint Reagan and be converted. Look, Reagan was an influential figure and inspired a generation of Republican leaders to follow in his wake, and yes his telegenic skills were an asset to his understanding of how to handle issue framing. But to reduce everything down to his overwhelming oratory powers of persuasion makes it seem like everyone in the world is falling prey to a linguistic cheat code they are unaware of. It’s the kind of deification that we might see in a North Korean movie extolling the powers of Kim Jong-Un (“He golfed a hole-in-one with every hole”). This is what a hagiography does rather than an honest biography, and that is why Reagan becomes a relatively useless dramatic enterprise except for those already predisposed to wanting to have their nostalgia tickled and their worldviews safely confirmed.

I wasn’t exactly expecting, say, an even-handed review over Reagan’s legacy, but there’s something rather incendiary about how it distills all of the opposition to Reagan and his policies. Our KGB narrator intones that not everybody was a fan of good ole Ronnie, and then in an abbreviated montage we get real news footage of protestors with placards condemning the Reagan administration for ignoring the AIDS epidemic, for tax cuts for the rich, for supporting the apartheid government of South Africa, for gutting social safety net programs, etc. The handling of the Iran-Contra scandal is hilariously sidestepped by the same Reagan who is shown on screen being so dogmatic about sticking to law that he fired all the striking air traffic control workers. It’s not enough that the movie reduces all relevant critical opposition to Reagan to a brief music montage, it’s that the movie then quickly transitions directly to a map of the 1984 electorate with Reagan winning in a landslide, as if to say, “Well, these cranky dead-enders sure were upset by these issues, but they must be wrong because the American people overwhelmingly re-elected him.”

I never found Quaid’s performance to be enlightening or endearing, more mimicry that settles into an unsettling cracked-mirror version. It always felt like an imitation for me, like something I’d see on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s with Phil Hartman. He holds the grin and nasally voice but delivers little pathos. It’s not exactly the actor’s fault when the screenplay gives him such little to do. There was a real opportunity to better humanize him toward the end as his mental decline was becoming more of a force. Instead, it’s relegated to the very end, as a gauzy way to usher the man off the stage with our sympathies. Voight (Ray Donovan) gets the most lines in the whole movie and really seems to savor his Ruskie accent. Curiously, his character is talking to a promising KGB pupil trying to learn where they went wrong and it’s not set up to be Vladamir Putin, himself a former KGB agent. The only other significant supporting role that lasts is Nancy Reagan played by Penelope Ann Miller (The Shadow, Carlito’s Way) and she’s relegated to the suffering spouse on the sidelines that always has the steel spine and the word of encouragement. Her best moment of acting was her embarrassment as a captive witness to Ronnie, before his step into politics, awkwardly dancing on stage with the PBR players as a shill for the beer company.

Let’s be honest about who Reagan is aimed at, an older, mostly conservative audience looking back at the time of Reagan’s reign and thinking, “Those were the good old days.” It’s not made for people like me, a progressive who legitimately believes that many of our modern-day problems can trace their source from the eight years of the Reagan administration. I’m talking about the trickle-down-economic fallacy that girds so much Republican magical thinking when it comes to taxes. I’m talking union busting, I’m talking his “welfare queen” projection, I’m talking the selling of arms for hostages (bonus fact: the Reagan campaign was secretly negotiating with Iran not to release the hostages until after the election to better doom Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election), I’m talking about making college education far more expensive by massive cuts to state funding, I’m talking the rise of the disingenuous “textualist” judicial philosophy that only seems to mean something when its proponents want it to, I’m talking about training and arming Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (wonder why the movie chose not to include this since it is Reagan fighting communism), and so on and so on. Naturally none of these are held to scrutiny by Reagan the movie because it’s from the writer of God’s Not Dead and the director of Bratz.

Suffice to say, Reagan has many notable shortcomings depicting a president who, with every passing year, only seems to add to his own shortcomings in legacy (the Party of Reagan has willfully given up all its purported principles to become the Party of Trump). If you’re looking for an overly gauzy, sentimental, and simplistic retelling of what people already know about Ronald Reagan, then this movie is for you. If you’re looking for anything more, then this is the New Coke of presidential biopics.

Nate’s Grade: C-