Reagan‘s accuracy and message undermined by cheesy quality

Ronald Wilson Reagan, President of the United States from 1981 to 1989, was one of the great leaders of the twentieth century. His bold defense policy, rejection of détente, and support for anti-communist freedom fighters, like the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Polish Solidarity, were major contributions to the collapse of the Soviet Evil Empire. While Sean McNamara’s new biopic Reagan has some convincing performances, is a generally accurate history lesson, and promotes the right moral values, its saccharine hagiographic tone and overlooking of other actors and factors in the collapse of Soviet communism make it clear that a film’s admirable wholesome message does not always correspond to its aesthetic values.

The narrator of Reagan is a fictional former KGB agent named Viktor Petrovich, played by Jon Voight, who pulls of a convincing Russian accent and tells a young Russian primed for leadership of his country about why Soviet communism failed. The Byzantine icons in Petrovich’s apartment are a clear indication he has broken with Marxism-Leninism. Predictably, Petrovich’s narrative focuses entirely on Ronald Reagan, beginning with the latter’s resistance, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, to the communist infiltration of Hollywood and disputes with fellow American travelers like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

In the meantime, we see flashbacks of the young Ronald Reagan in small-town Illinois; the film depicts his life as one of unwavering virtue from his youth, reading from Scripture at church services as a child, saving lives as a teenage lifeguard, and sticking up for African American players on his college football team during the worst of the Jim Crow era.

Voight’s performance is the best part of Reagan. Fifty-five years earlier, he awed audiences as a naïve, dimwitted, but oddly good-natured aspiring male prostitute in Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy; in 2005, he was great as Pope St. John Paul II in a moving American TV miniseries. Now, as an elderly ex-KGB agent who has become an apostate of communism, he proves to be a truly versatile actor, brilliantly playing morally diverse characters.

In one scene, when his young interlocutor describes the fall of the USSR as a failure to Russia, Voight’s Petrovich angrily points to his heart and says that “this is Russia”—not communism—then pointing to his portraits of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, who are truly Russia. At a time when Russian nationalism has led to a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, during which schools, nursing homes, and hospitals have been bombed and thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died while millions have fled in what is Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II, this is a powerful reminder that a different Russia than Putin’s cruel imperialism is possible. It cannot be a coincidence that Petrovich points at an image of Tolstoy, a pacifist who corresponded with and inspired Mahatma Gandhi, rather than Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, excellent writers who nevertheless were not immune to Russian ethnic and religious chauvinism.

The other performances are mostly fine. Dennis Quaid looks and sounds largely like Reagan, both when appealing for the end of the division of Germany in front of the Berlin Wall or riding horseback at his California ranch. However, Quaid, who is seventy, the same age as Ronald Reagan when he moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, plays the president at various stages in his life, and the makeup isn’t always great. When Quaid plays Reagan in his thirties, he looks at least fifty-five.

By contrast, the weakest performance is that of Polish actor Aleksander Krupa, who over a career lasting nearly four decades has become Hollywood’s go-to man to play Slavic gangsters in supporting roles. In Reagan, he plays Mikhail Gorbachev, but he looks and moves more like Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins than as the last Soviet general secretary.

Petrovich’s monologue on Reagan’s life is generally quite accurate. Many of Reagan’s most memorable pronouncements are quoted directly and in length, including “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”; the “rendezvous with destiny” and Soviet “Evil Empire” speeches; and his moving post-presidential letter announcing that he has succumbed to Alzheimer’s, that most heartbreaking of maladies. The 135 minutes of Reagan provide a good resource to high school and post-secondary history teachers.

The film also portrays that moral courage and fidelity to one’s convictions, increasingly rare qualities in politics, can change the world. Communism, with its promises of a classless society free of poverty and conflict, duped many well-intentioned people. Meanwhile, many leaders approached the USSR not as an “Evil Empire” but as a partner for negotiations. Even Winston Churchill, a great statesman who helped save both his nation and continent from the Third Reich, famously said of Stalin: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons.”

By contrast, Ronald Reagan always knew that communism was evil and made the liberation of hundreds of millions of people behind the Iron Curtain a political priority. McNamara’s film emphasizes that this was rooted in Reagan’s faith. In fact, Ronald Reagan’s relationship to Christianity and God was quite complex; while he was convinced of the moral greatness of Christianity, quoted C. S. Lewis, and, despite being a Protestant, was even interested in the Marian apparitions at Fatima and Medjugorje, he seldom attended church as an adult.

Another morally uplifting aspect of Reagan is its depiction of the eponymous Republican president’s friendly relationship with Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, played by Danu Lauria of Wonder Years fame. While the two disagree on political issues, sometimes intensely, they bond over their Irish heritage and respect one another; O’Neil visits the president after his assassination. At a time of increasing polarization, when sometimes even family members don’t speak to one another because of political preferences, this is an important reminder that it is possible to differ civilly, even amicably.

While I do not regret seeing Reagan, I left the theater less than satisfied. First, there was the presentation of Reagan himself. Today, “hagiography” has become a dirty word when referring to biographical books or films. There is nothing wrong with praising a historical figure, but it is weaknesses and character flaws that can be most fascinating and instructive.

Ronald Reagan was a Cold War hero, but like everyone, he had flaws. Being in charge of a Cold War superpower is an extremely difficult responsibility, and it would have been impossible to avoid mistakes. Yet the only time any of Reagan’s flaws is presented on screen is during the Iran-Contra scandal, which is depicted in such a way that Reagan himself isn’t sure if he erred deliberately.

The film, unsurprisingly, ignores Reagan’s flaws, such as the fact that his anti-communism may have blinded him to other injustices. For example, Reagan continued his predecessor’s policy of arming the military junta in El Salvador; during the 1979-1992 civil war in the country, 75,000 people were killed, ninety percent of whom were peasants fighting for their land (as well as nuns, lay religious volunteers, and priests, including the canonized Archbishop Oscar Romero, who defended the peasants’ basic rights). In the Philippines, meanwhile, a peaceful, prayerful revolution led by Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila contributed to the fall of the corrupt, violent dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Reagan, however, saw Marcos as a bulwark of anti-communism in Asia and supported him. I am convinced that such foreign policies did not result from Reagan’s ill will but from his human limitations. Yet the biopic depicts him as an all-American Übermensch.

After watching Reagan, I had to check if the film was produced by Pure Flix (it isn’t, although Pure Flix regular Kevin Sorbo makes an appearance as the young future president’s pastor). Reagan has a cheesy quality that makes the skin of the cinema snob in me crawl but at the same time feel guilty for my derision because such productions are clearly the work of good people with noble intentions. Although Reagan’s attitude towards religion was complex, the biopic makes him appear very devout. Given how unnaturally wholesome Reagan is, I found it amusing that the Gipper’s first wife, Jane Wyman, is played by Mena Suvari, who had prominent roles in the two smuttiest movies of 1999, American Beauty and American Pie.

While it is clear that Reagan’s screenwriter Howard Klausner researched his subject well and did not even make use of poetic license, what the film leaves out is frustrating. The uninformed viewer could conclude that the fall of the Soviet Union was 99 percent Reagan’s work. For instance, immediately after the film depicts the 1987 “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech, Petrovich’s narrative immediately proceeds to the collapse of the Berlin Wall more than two years later; one could surmise that nothing of significance happened in the meantime and that the unification of Germany was the immediate consequence of Reagan’s speech.

This is not good history. Any major historical event almost always has multiple causes. While President Reagan’s increased defense spending and Strategic Defense Initiative anti-missile defense system did make a major contribution to the end of the Cold War, one should not forget, for instance, the election of an anti-communist Pole as bishop of Rome and his role in inspiring Solidarity, a ten-million strong, nonviolent trade union and national liberation movement that in 1989, five months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, pushed Poland’s communist regime to hold the first semi-free elections in postwar East-Central Europe.

John Paul II is mentioned only twice in passing: when Reagan learns of the pope’s assassination attempt from a news broadcast and when the pope is mentioned as one of Reagan’s allies in the fight against the Soviets, alongside Margaret Thatcher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and the prime minister of Japan (did you know who the Japanese PM was in the 1980s? Neither did I, because historians never mention him in Cold War histories and don’t regard him as a major historical player). While several of Reagan’s meetings with Margaret Thatcher are portrayed, none of his five encounters with St. John Paul II are. Yet the film claims to be based on Paul Kengor’s book The Crusader, which devotes much attention to Reagan’s relationship with the pope and support, moral and financial, to Solidarity in Poland.

Another important cause of the end of the Cold War that is practically left out is Afghanistan. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded the Central Asian nation. Ultimately, the Soviets were defeated, in no small part due to the United States’ support for the mujahideen, or Islamic guerrillas. Although Reagan claims, through Viktor Petrovich, that Jimmy Carter was the Kremlin’s preferred presidential candidate, it was actually under President Carter—influenced by his National Security Advisor, an anti-communist Pole named Zbigniew Brzezinski—that Washington began supplying the mujahideen with modern weapons (the Carter administration also boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, a slight to the Kremlin). To his great credit, Reagan continued his predecessor’s Afghan policy, yet the sole mention of Afghanistan in Reagan is the fact that the president appealed to the Soviets to withdraw from the country.

It is no secret that America’s film critics are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats. If an equally simplistic, emotionally gooey biopic of, say, Barack Obama were made, it would likely have a higher score on Rotten Tomatoes than Reagan, which has merely 20 percent positive reviews (audience reactions, however, are much more positive). Yet while Reagan does have admirable qualities, its hagiographical, reductionistic presentation of Cold War history as well as strong fromage factor make viewing it an uneven experience.