There is a reason Hardline American conservatives view many books, movies, TV shows, music, theater, and other creative arts as ideologically toxic, tools for “indoctrinating” people with “woke” values or “preparing” children to adopt an LGBTQ identity and become sexually permissive. This is because they see little value in a piece of entertainment beyond its promotion of a political agenda and preferred cultural norms. For many on the far right, the fact that Hollywood is a liberal place means that it is no place for gays. necessarily Produce content to liberate audiences.
So the right has had to develop counterprograms—programs that mollify them with unequivocal assurances that they are right, and that they are the good guys. Some of these efforts aim to break away from the mainstream; consider Angel Studios, a Utah-based broadcasting and production company that focuses on religious material and has had a major hit with its child-trafficking drama. Voice of FreedomInstead, you could throw together a bunch of lost talent, including several actors who claim to be victims of discrimination in Tinseltown because of their right-wing views, to make a movie as boring as ReaganStarring Trump supporter Dennis Quaid as the Gipper.
Reagan “The American President Ronald Reagan” presents a comically oversimplified view that President Ronald Reagan was single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the only way to enjoy the film is to actually believe it. Even that may not be enough, because instead of focusing on any one period of Reagan’s life—much of which could have been a compelling story—the film mislays seven entire decades in a two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Historians can and should certainly point out the film’s many errors. ReaganBut it would be foolish to hope that these criticisms will make sense to viewers who came for the mindless hero worship and got a lot out of it.
It might be instructive, then, to examine how director Sean McNamara failed to combine real drama with propaganda. Here, the inability to transform Ronald Reagan into a work of art indicates not his worthlessness as a subject, but the poverty of his imagination. (Author J. G. Ballard had no such problems.) In fact, Reagan I can’t even follow the outline of your biopic, because it refuses to allow its hero any sort of complex flaws, and the geopolitical deadlock that serves as the central conflict is too big and abstract for the frame. Instead, you get years and years of pre-presidential communism grumbling to anyone who will listen, and those people like it for some reason.
The film also gives in to its loyal audience. Because there’s so much ground to cover, we’re treated to new characters popping in and out as if on a carousel, adding nothing to the narrative in their brief on-screen slivers. In the absence of scenes in which we learn who these people are and why they matter, they’re introduced with captions of their names. But why should we care if this person is Caspar Weinberger or the other is William B. Clarke? The filmmakers certainly don’t care; we’re browsing Wikipedia. They don’t trust the audience to rely on contextual clues to the point that they label familiar scenes needlessly: A shot of the Golden Gate Bridge reads “San Francisco, California,” while a clip of Big Ben looming over the Thames reads “London, United Kingdom.” I’ve never seen the equivalent of a Ben Garrison cartoon in theaters. Too bad they didn’t put “Washington, D.C.” above the White House.
Questions of craft must have been seen as a mere distraction from the message. ReaganThe wretched wig and makeup suggest that no gay people were allowed on the set, and as the younger Reagan, Quaid looks like he’s been transfigured. The periodic de-aging of Jon Voight, who plays a former KGB spy, is doomed from the start, as is the choice to frame the president’s life as a story of civilizational conflict told through his wretched Russian accent. (As a side note, Quaid never quite settles on the pronunciation of “Gorbachev.”) The film also fails to pronounce “Gorbachev” correctly. It seems A terrible film, with muddled depth of field and unsettling edges of light that may have been intended to evoke Reagan's sanctity but often give the sense that the actors were digitally inserted into a room.
Posting a hacked image is a completely different matter – in that sense, Reagan The tribute is fitting—and one that is so self-important that it has no sense of humor or irony. The two or three jokes are met with fake laughter from about the same number of theatergoers, while unintended funny lines, like Reagan’s words to Nancy early in their speech, “There’s no such thing as a relationship with a horse,” slip by without us noticing them twice. And we hear Reagan, in his 1983 speech calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” quoting C.S. Lewis. Scrotab messagesIn his speech, Reagan noted that the greatest evils were no longer practiced in crime dens, but “in clean, carpeted, warm, well-lit offices, by quiet men with white collars, clipped fingernails, and smooth-shaven cheeks, who didn’t need to raise their voices”—as if we were to object to his escalation of the war on drugs and his ignoring of the AIDS crisis from the Oval Office, while clean-shaven. Elsewhere, Reagan solemnly repeats, “Family matters.” An emotionally detached and absent father, the man did not recognize his son after speaking at the young man’s high school graduation. Reagan This detail is due to: The children had disappeared by 1969.
The mythology of the film is insulting enough without the inclusion of Creed Scott Stapp as an awkward Frank Sinatra or Kevin Sorbo as the priest who baptizes young Ronnie. Yet the whitewashing of Reagan’s mockery of communists remains the film’s defining sin, a testament to how any sense of characterization is swamped by the petty desire to win a one-sided debate. You can see it in everything from the portrayal of communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as a weak gay shill for Reagan’s cowboy (there’s no serious speculation that Trumbo, who was married to Cleo Fincher for a long time and had three children with him, was not straight), to the automatic assumption that funding the Contras in Nicaragua was justified, to the ridiculous notion of Voight’s KGB character slowly realizing that Reagan is the anointed crusader who will bring world peace.
Well… why not? The word “communist” means nothing more to the “Make America Great Again” advocates in 2024 than it did to Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in 1954: the opportunity to scare people with a fake crisis and thus control them. After all, Reagan This book is a greater insult to the 40th president of the United States than anything else I can say about him, because it dispenses with the human in order to create a three-dimensional image of him that is more false than the Strategic Defense Initiative. At its best, the biography is a conflict between figures known for their influence and power. Reagan He only cares about getting both.
