Review: Reagan — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Reagan

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG-13

Run Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

Stars: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight

Writer: Howard Klausner

Director: Sean McNamara

 

In olden times, most movie biographies were so blatantly adoring you wondered how there would be room enough on Mount Rushmore for all those heroic men and women.

But something was off about them; once you removed a subject’s warts, you got a hopelessly gauze-filtered rendering that more resembled a Greek statue than a living, breathing human being. Not until the 1960s, when films like Lawrence of Arabia and Patton proved that heroic real-life characters could also be tragically flawed, did their dark sides begin to emerge in the movies.

Still, a great performance can transcend a filmmaker’s reluctance to cast their lead character in a shadowy light: James Cagney burst through the screen as George M. Cohan in the tuneful but fact-challenged Yankee Doodle Dandy; Doris Day’s girl-next-door persona softened the rough real-life edges of nightclub singer Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me.

A young actor named Ronald Reagan played his share of sand-blasted historical figures, starring as doomed footballer George Gipp in The Knute Rockne Story and General George Custer in Santa Fe Trail. Now, Ronnie himself benefits from a reverent narrative filter in Reagan, a shamelessly adoring biopic that is single-handedly rescued from worshipful ignominy by its star, Dennis Quaid, who stubbornly chips through the script’s plaster façade to offer glimpses of a man who spent his entire career concealing his complexities.

There’s certainly not much complexity in the script by Howard Klausner (Space Cowboysr), a conventional cradle-to-grave narrative that is framed by a fictional former Kremlin analyst (a growly Jon Voight), who relates to a young colleague how the Soviet Union fretfully traced Reagan’s career from the time he was vice president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s.

The Russians, in this telling, watched Reagan’s ascent with mounting trepidation, understanding that of all possible future leaders of the Free World, he — and, presumably, he alone — would have the fortitude to stand up to what Reagan would one day dub The Evil Empire.

It all starts in northern Illinois, where young Ronnie’s personality is forged in the heated relationship between his hard-drinking, irresponsible father and his Bible-believing, strong-willed mother (who, disturbingly, teaches her son a lesson in self-reliance by watching from a window as he is beaten up by a gang of bullies).

Like a 1930s passenger train, the cinematic Reagan Express makes all the expected station stops: his stint as a heroic lifeguard (although the Russian analyst suggests more than one “drowning” young woman was really just angling to be swept up in hunky Ronnie’s arms); his college football career (standing up for Black teammates who faced racist housing policies); his early days as a radio announcer (skeptically reporting on Hitler’s promises of peace).

Radio leads to acting, then to Hollywood, where Ronnie’s good looks and forthright manner land him some supporting roles and a detour, as an Army reservist, making training films.

He marries rising star Jane Wyman (American Beauty’s Mena Suvari), who’s portrayed here as a coldhearted shrew — all the better to draw a contrast with his future wife, actress Nancy Davis (Penelope Ann Miller), who falls for Ronnie like a Rodeo Drive coconut.

Quaid arrives in the Reagan role when our boy is in his 30s — something of a stretch for the 69-year-old actor. Deft makeup and digital effects somewhat effectively erase most of those years, and Quaid, seemingly athletic as ever, still has the appropriate bounce in his step to play a much younger man. From there, the film hopscotches through the 1950s, with special focus on Reagan fighting perceived communist infiltration of Hollywood.

Oddly, the film dismisses in five seconds or so Reagan’s eight-year tenure as the weekly host and frequent star of General Electric Theater, a series that never fell out of TV’s Top 20 and made him a household name. It was while making hundreds of personal appearances for GE that Reagan sharpened the speaking skills that would someday earn him the nickname “The Great Communicator.”

In keeping with the film’s hagiographic mission, neither the script nor direction by Sean McNamara (Soul Surfer) rises to challenge a biographical arc that could have been offered by the 1980 Republican National Committee. But Quaid, whose easy charm and devilish good looks have always camouflaged a flinty actor’s inquisitiveness, keeps digging for nuggets of Reagan’s soul.

When Quaid’s Reagan sits down across from Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa, a fine Polish character actor who’s made a career playing inscrutable Eastern Europeans), he flashes the trademark Reagan smile, but his eyes are busy reading the Soviet leader, discerning how to attain the upper hand. In a showdown with faculty at Berkeley, the affable governor suddenly explodes in a dark-eyed, spitting tirade, an ugly fissure revealing the emotional lava that churned beneath Reagan’s aw-shucks public persona. And although I suspect the filmmakers never had it in mind, for the last years of Reagan’s presidency Quaid presents a softer, less cocky Ronnie, hinting that while the old actor could still summon up the image of outward assurance, in some corner of his mind he could feel himself slipping away.

The greatest challenge in any loving portrait of Reagan as President is in handling the Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan Administration facilitated the release of several Mideast hostages by illegally selling weapons to Iran, then used proceeds from the sale to secretly fund a Central American guerrilla force. In the film’s most dynamic scene, Reagan and Nancy verbally duke it out on Air Force One — he downplaying the threat to his administration, she trying to get it through his skull that he faces actual impeachment. The camera leads the two as they pace through the plane’s cramped corridors, Reagan essentially running away from his wife, who stays on his tail, screaming sense into him.

It all ends with one of the more remarkable Presidential addresses ever, from which, to their credit, the filmmakers don’t retreat: Reagan tells the nation that although he still doesn’t believe his administration traded arms for hostages, it is clear his administration traded arms for hostages. And he’s sorry.

Of course, the film suggests the American people, inspired by Reagan’s honesty, instantly forgave him. In truth, his approval ratings plunged to all-time lows.

By the end of Reagan’s tad-overlong 2 hour and 15 minutes, we’re totally buying into Quaid as The Gipper. Whether you were on the original Reagan bandwagon or not, it’s hard to suppress the lump in your throat as the once-proud ex-President, his mind slipping away to Alzheimer’s, takes one last ride through the hills of his California ranch.

Is Reagan a great film? Nope. But Dennis Quaid gives a great performance, elevating a movie made for those who still miss The Gipper’s crooked, nodding smile and who long for a time when a politician could be both ruthlessly committed and uncommonly kind.