In 1985, historian Edmund Morris was granted full White House access to produce Ronald Reagan’s official biography. It was critically panned upon its release 14 years later, primarily for Morris’ decision to narrate the biography from the perspective of a fictionalized version of himself. Yet Morris defended his unorthodox literary device, saying that personality was his central interest, and Reagan’s true personality was entirely unknowable.
“He was truly one of the strangest men who’s ever lived,” Morris later recalled. “Every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, ‘You know, I could never really figure him out.’”
Others who knew or wrote about the 40th president have echoed these sentiments. In public, he could be at once sweet-natured and winsome. He was also fiercely competitive and ambitious, both in his pursuit of political office and his quest to destroy the Soviet Union. But more than any of his political victories or personal adventures, what’s striking about Reagan is how his inner life has proven resolutely elusive. He was intensely private and seemed to have no close friends. One would think that such an enigmatic carapace, so thoroughly defined by contradiction, could be elegantly captured in an endless number of ways on film.
Unfortunately, Reagan, director Sean McNamara’s long-awaited biopic, has no concept of elegance. It’s obvious and dogmatic, blunt and superficial. The film kneels to its subject with messianic reverence and treats history with the simplicity of a children’s storybook. Unlike Reagan himself, it’s a creature of pure loud exterior, proudly hostile to nuance.
Reagan presents the titular character’s life in the style of a patchwork quilt, jumping between significant events with little regard for coherence. It follows Reagan (Dennis Quaid) from birth to death, but there’s no rhythm to the narrative. McNamara seems oblivious to the principles of pacing as scenes begin and end arbitrarily, raising intriguing narrative threads—like the disintegration of Reagan’s first marriage to actress Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari)—and then leaving them unexplored. Reagan grows from boy, to man, to president in what feels like minutes. As we move through seminal moments in his life at the speed of a NASCAR race, the movie keeps us at an emotional distance from anything that might be affecting.
Reagan’s most baffling stylistic quirk is McNamara’s decision to frame the plot around the recollections of Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight), a fictional retired KGB agent. As the film begins, Petrovich is visited in the present day by a young Russian operative who asks him how the USSR collapsed. He proceeds to narrate Reagan’s life story, but his character is a distraction that adds nothing to the narrative. Voight sounds like a senile Yakov Smirnoff as he attempts a risible Russian accent, and his scenes are punctuated by overdramatic musical cues that evoke a ‘70s soap opera. Tonally, the film has more in common with Spies Like Us than a biographical epic.
Voight isn’t the only capable actor here whose performance inspires profound embarrassment. Dennis Quaid himself bears greater resemblance to a melting wax figure of Liberace than Reagan, and his vocal intonations are on par with a low-rent impressionist. Penelope Ann Miller plays Nancy Reagan like Diane Keaton after a lobotomy, delivering every line with a look and inflection of ditzy, wide-eyed amazement.
Granted, screenwriter Howard Klausner’s clumsy, juvenile dialogue does her no favors, and it’s clearly a cause of great strain for the rest of the cast. Reagan features a profusion of talented character actors who appear briefly to furnish the action, but none of them speak like real people. There’s a pervasive air of falseness to the film that’s compounded by its prosaic cinematography, dated special effects, and the unsettling veneer of digital de-aging evident on so many of its actors’ faces.
For a film about a figure so renowned for his sense of humor, Reagan suffers from a dearth of wit. But occasionally, Klausner’s screenplay offers something intentionally and unexpectedly funny. “Is there anything worse than an actor with a cause?” Wyman asks Reagan as he begins his crusade against Hollywood communism. Later, when Reagan assumes the presidency and plans to begin negotiating with the USSR, he’s confronted with the deaths and identical funerals of three Soviet leaders in rapid succession. “How can I talk to them when they keep dying on me?” he asks with exhaustion.
These scenes, directed with zest, also reveal a spark of ingenuity on McNamara’s part that surfaces in other rare instances. One creative sequence presents a montage of the interchangeable commercials Reagan starred in after his Hollywood career began to falter. Quaid delivers his canned endorsements on gaudy sets in old-fashioned outfits, with a look of pained enthusiasm that inspires genuine amusement. But good ideas such as these are outweighed by countless woeful ones. It’s difficult to even recognize what Reagan gets right when the film also features Lesley-Anne Down’s excruciating, Fawlty Towers-esque portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, or a depiction of Reagan’s attempted assassination in which every actor seems intent on making constipated facial expressions.
Whatever its flaws, conservatives may feel compelled to celebrate Reagan out of sheer gratitude that such a movie could even exist. But if the purpose of art is to influence culture, they should demand far better than this. There’s an elementary distinction between art and propaganda that the hagiographic Reagan is either ignorant of or unconcerned with, and yet for all of its crude gesticulations in the direction of God and patriotism, it never manages to make a clear point or advance a strong theme.
Ronald Reagan lived a remarkable life, and his real self remains a fascinating mystery. But by the end of Reagan, he seems like little more than a caricature. Some day, a talented filmmaker or documentarian will have the vision to capture his life in the fair, thorough, and exciting fashion it deserves. Until then, Americans should stick to their biographies.
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