Reagan wasn’t made for critics.
I know this, because I wasn’t invited. There was a preview screening, but no critics I know were in attendance; I only know it took place because I almost accidentally stumbled into it on my way to see Kneecap (a film which, to say the least, has a dramatically different perspective on the legacy of Margaret Thatcher). Reagan’s ads trumpet its audience score (98%, likely padded by get-out-the-vote campaigns) while downplaying its critics score (19% and falling). And honestly, why would I see it? I’m a snotty, bleeding-heart film critic writing for a former punk rock webzine– in Massachusetts, of all places– and our time on this earth is so fleeting that I do my best to favor films with at least the possibility of being worth my readers’ time. I was content to go my way and let Reagan go its own.
Until, at least, I received a text from the Hassle’s own Joshua Polanski, in which he challenged me to watch and review the presidential biopic. Josh was almost certainly joking, but unfortunately this is precisely the sort of dare from which I am incapable of backing down. As much as I delight in seeing the best movies which come out every year, my first love is trash cinema; I devoured the filmography of Ed Wood long before I got around to watching Citizen Kane, and I probably spent at least a full day of my life in various early 2010s screenings of The Room. Nudging me towards watching a terrible movie is like facetiously suggesting a gambling addict withdraw his life savings in Reno, or presenting a recovering arsonist with a box of matches as a gag gift. I was powerless.
And so it was that I found myself in the back row of an 11:00 AM Sunday matinee of Reagan, alongside exactly five other early-risers. I’m tempted to blame Josh for my experience during the following two hours, but I know that I have no one to blame but myself.
Reagan the movie is, I suppose, marginally better than Reagan the president, inasmuch as it has neither instituted economic policies which have crippled three generations and counting, nor caused through inaction the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans (though it is early yet in its theatrical run). It is still leagues away from what you or I might consider a “good movie,” or even “a movie.” Though its years spent in development hell likely preclude the possibility, it has the artificial sheen of generative AI, as if someone fed “reverent biopic of Ronald Reagan” into an algorithm. As in a competent AI, the resulting film is exactly what you’d expect from those words and nothing more, which means, if you’re among the film’s target audience, you’ll probably walk away satisfied. If you’re like me, your mouth will be dry from your jaw hanging open.
The titular president is here portrayed by Dennis Quaid, which is admittedly a canny choice. Quaid does not particularly resemble Reagan; though he’s covered in mountains of prosthetics (which seem to multiply like tumors as the character ages) and leans on the “Hwell,” tic that was a staple of hack comics in the ‘80s, it’s difficult to lose sight of the fact that you are in fact watching Dennis Quaid. This, I reckon, is by design. Quaid is, after all, something of a unicorn in the contemporary entertainment universe, a conservative who still manages to come off as a human being. Unlike many outspokenly right-wing actors, Quaid still occasionally appears in “real” movies; we’ll be seeing him again in a couple of weeks in, of all things, Coralie Fargeat’s transgressive body horror satire The Substance (the only way this accidental double feature could get funnier would be if Quaid gets awards notice for the latter). In 2020, he spoke highly of Donald Trump’s performance, but also worked with Anthony Fauci to get the word out on vaccines (it should be noted that the actor has endorsed Trump in 2024). He’s conservative, but he’s not weird about it. It’s not like he’s Jon Voight or something, right?
Reagan is narrated by a retired KGB agent, played by Jon Voight. Set in smoky back rooms of the Kremlin, Voight’s wizened apparatchik fills in a new Russian leader– at length– on the man who toppled the Soviet Union (set in the “Present Day,” this framing device seems to suggest a world in which Vladimir Putin has been ousted from power; one would think these characters would have more pressing concerns at this particular moment than long-winded anecdotes about Ronald Reagan’s years as a teenage lifeguard). “We called him The Crusader,” Voight recalls, speaking of Reagan as a sort of god-man-superhero who singlehandedly foiled the ambitions of the USSR.
Indeed, Reagan’s entire life story is filtered through the lens of his visceral hatred of communism. Inevitably, this storyline begins in Hollywood, which leads to one of the most frankly astounding sequences I’ve seen at the movies in quite some time. Reagan was, of course, a prominent namer-of-names before the House Un-American Activities Committee and a key figure in the construction of the Hollywood blacklist, and Reagan portrays this as an unequivocally good thing. Jack Warner, among the friendliest of HUAC witnesses, is played by Kevin Dillon as a square-jawed crusader urging Reagan to squash the communist sympathizers in Hollywood. Even more inexplicably, Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter whose battles against the blacklist made him a Hollywood folk hero, is portrayed as a limp-wristed gay stereotype, a devious sissy counterpoint to Ronald Reagan, All-American (It should be noted that the real Trumbo was, by all accounts, straight; this is the first insinuation I’ve ever heard to the contrary). HUAC is never mentioned by name– Reagan is merely “testifying before congress”– and neither is its head, Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name has long since passed into the realm of historical bogeymen. The whole thing plays like a sly rebrand pitched toward audiences too young or ill-informed to know better, an attempt to retcon a truly dark chapter in American history. It’s fucking terrifying.
To its credit, Reagan does not toe the party line that the president was a Hollywood idol on par with John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart prior to his political career. Reagan was, at his height, a B-list leading man at best, and found greater fame later as a pitchman in the early days of television (amusingly, a montage of Reagan’s advertising work includes logos for multiple companies which would not exist for decades, such as SuperPretzel and Charleys Philly Steaks; product placement, it seems, transcends the barriers of time). Reagan treats its subject’s stymied Hollywood ambitions with self-effacing good humor, admitting, as Reagan himself did, that it was a silly adventure in his life.
Yet this dismissal of Reagan’s first career somewhat gives the game away. A scene recreating one of Reagan’s early film roles looks not only as if the filmmakers hadn’t seen the film they’re restaging, but as if they’ve never seen a movie at all; it’s got the flat, kitschy sheen of a Hollywood-themed episode of a 1980s sitcom. Reagan itself doesn’t look much better. The Washington scenes resemble a movie-within-a-movie in a satire of filmmaking (think 30 Rock, or perhaps the fictional Forrest Gump sequel in Cecil B. Demented), while the scenes set in Russia look like the cut scenes in an early 2000s CD-ROM game. Even a simple scene of a roaring fireplace is accomplished via chintzy CGI. It looks more like the idea of a movie than a movie itself.
This is, of course, fine by the film’s target audience, most of whom likely see only a handful of new movies a year. And it’s certainly fine by its makers. Reagan is a product of the strange shadow-Hollywood which produces such “wholesome” conservative entertainments as the evangelical wet-dream fantasy God’s Not Dead and the Q-baiting rescue thriller Sound of Freedom. These films reliably jet to the top of the box office charts through church group recommendations (or, in the case of Sound of Freedom, thinly veiled pyramid schemes) while barely registering among the unconverted. These films are almost always searingly ugly, because the filmmakers see the medium as wholly secondary to the message; indeed, many view the film industry as an evil to be cast out. When Reagan decides that making movies is a trivial pursuit, one gets the sense that the filmmakers agree with him.
All of which made watching Reagan a deeply surreal experience. Here I was, watching a film which was in no way made for my eyes, visually depressing and politically abhorrent. My screening was nearly empty– of the five other attendees, four were twentysomethings who I’m fairly certain were there ironically, and the fifth was an older gentleman who was snoring loudly by the time Ronnie sat down with Gorbachev– but I’m sure it’s played to packed houses across the country, to people laughing and cheering as if it were a real movie. What do these people make of the quick montage of protest footage– including a shot of the AIDS Quilt– which is presented as just another headache the president had to deal with while battling communism? Are they aware, when Reagan folksily lays out his plan for “trickle-down economics,” that he is describing the reason they can’t afford a house? The answer, of course, is no. Reagan completes the former president’s journey from b-movie lead to b-movie character, from a president propped up by the Religious Right to a beatified stock figure of evangelical cinema. If Reagan was a little better as a movie it could be genuinely dangerous, coming as it does at a moment when another washed-up TV pitchman is within striking distance of a seat from which he might do even more irreparable harm. As it is, it just feels tired and lame.
Reagan wasn’t made for critics– but it doesn’t respect its audience either.
Reagan
2024
dir. Sean McNamara
141 min.
Now playing at a bunch of theaters, if you must.
