I’m a Historian of the ’80s. I Cannot Tell You How Bizarre the New Ronald Reagan Movie Is.
In his quirky and smart 1987 book Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology, political scientist Michael Rogin considered how Reagan the actor became Reagan the president. “Reagan was president because of film,” Rogin wrote, and nobody understood the power of the medium better than Reagan himself. In fact, the former B-movie star and newly inaugurated president had been slated to speak at the Academy Awards on March 30, 1981. “Film is forever,” Reagan was supposed to tell the Motion Picture Academy and the millions watching at home. “It is the motion picture that shows all of us not only how we look and sound but—more important—how we feel.”
But the president never made those remarks. On the day of the Oscars, he was shot and nearly killed by John Hinckley Jr., who in a peculiar twist had been “inspired” to carry out his attack by another actor, a young Jodie Foster, as she appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver. Hinckley “had cast himself in the role of its isolated, deranged, and violent protagonist,” played by Robert De Niro. The would-be assassin, Rogin noted, struggled to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Reagan survived that assassination attempt, of course, and he would continue to play the role of president for the next eight years. Across his two terms, Reagan “soar[ed] above the real,” a Hollywood hero leading the nation through “a titanic struggle between the forces of good and an empire of evil.” As cable TV fueled the tabloidization of the news media industry and public trust in government waned, the 40th president blurred an increasingly thin line between fantasy and real life. Thirty-five years after Reagan left office and twenty years after his death, as tens of millions prepare to cast their ballots (again) for a mendacious and malignant former reality TV star, that line has all but vanished from American political life.
Like Reagan the actor and Reagan the president, Reagan the new movie has a strained relationship with reality. In director Sean McNamara’s biopic, the Gipper, played by Dennis Quaid, can do no wrong. Charming, principled, and relentlessly optimistic, McNamara’s Reagan single-handedly resuscitates the U.S. economy, brings down the Soviet Union, and returns the nation to glory. Suffice it to say, such a hagiographic treatment requires countless omissions, distortions, and outright fabrications. Worse still, perhaps, Reagan is bloated and tedious—its lack of focus and vision exacerbated only by an insulting 135-minute runtime. This is an affront to both history and cinema, to both reality and fantasy.
Reagan begins with Hinckley’s assassination attempt—an event that, the film clumsily implies, may have been orchestrated by the Soviets. It then chaotically toggles between the more distant past and the present day (2024). Several minutes in, the film finally settles into a mostly chronological narrative relayed by the retired KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (played, apathetically, by Jon Voight). Petrovich, a fictional composite of several KGB agents and Soviet intelligence officials, navigates viewers through Reagan’s setbacks and triumphs from childhood through old age. (About halfway through the movie, he informs the audience that Soviet operatives actually had nothing to do with Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life.)
Petrovich, in his voice-over, says that he had kept tabs on Reagan since his early days as a movie star in the 1930s and 1940s, when the “commies” (a term used unironically in the film) had ostensibly gained a foothold in Hollywood. They really hadn’t. Historians and everyday Americans alike now recognize the Second Red Scare as an overzealous and misguided effort to purge alleged communist sympathizers from government, academia, Hollywood, and beyond. Yet Reagan missed the memo. Ronald Reagan’s red-baiting—exemplified most clearly through his 1947 testimony as Screen Actors Guild president before the House Un-American Activities Committee—becomes a virtue in the film. After all, Ronnie must discipline folks like the (queer-coded) Hollywood writer who deigns to discuss inequality in front of the future commander in chief during one scene in the film.
While the movie correctly identifies anticommunism as Reagan’s lodestar, and seemingly celebrates his disdain for the downtrodden and dispossessed, it also (very curiously) turns him into an anti-racist trailblazer of sorts. As a guard on Eureka College’s football team in the 1930s, the real-life Reagan invited two of his Black teammates to stay with his family after a local hotel had refused to host them. In Reagan, this act of kindness serves as evidence of its protagonist’s fundamental decency.
Yet to present Ronald Reagan as a white ally in the struggle for racial equality, the film must obscure his actual record on race and civil rights. When detailing Reagan’s support for Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, for instance, the film makes no mention of Reagan’s or Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act—or the fact that Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona and five former Confederate states in that contest. As Reagan formally launched his own political career in the mid-1960s, he catered to racist voters by demonstrating his hostility to African American civil rights. He opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Running for governor of California in 1966, he backed the controversial Proposition 14, which had undone fair-housing protections in the state. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” Reagan explained at the time, “it is his right to do so.”
The list goes on. From his “states’ rights” speech at the 1980 Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi—just miles from the site where Freedom Summer organizers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been murdered—to his enthusiastic use of the term welfare queen, to his intensification of the racist war on drugs, Reagan’s record on race is clear. And to maintain the illusion of a racially egalitarian Ronald Reagan, it is a record that Reagan must completely ignore.
In the film, the war on drugs gets relegated to a short montage spotlighting the Reagan White House’s most ardent opponents. These people occupy the fringes of American society, Reagan suggests. Protesters carrying signs condemning the “New Jim Crow” appear briefly, as do nuclear-freeze activists and members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) petitioning for a stronger government response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. During the Reagan administration, nearly 90,000 people—disproportionately queer and of color—died of AIDS-related causes. HIV/AIDS represents the president’s most consequential political and policy failure, yet it quickly vanishes from the screen, replaced by the 1984 Electoral College map illustrating Reagan’s decisive 525–13 victory. In Reagan, dissenting voices, no matter how righteous, may as well be shouting into the void.
Even the character of Petrovich, who spent his (fictional) career trying to subvert democratic capitalism and everything that Ronald Reagan stood for, cannot help but admire and respect the Gipper, the supposed architect of the Soviet Union’s demise. The film’s insistence that “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War,” as Pat Buchanan told the 1992 Republican National Convention, might be its most outrageous claim. This is not to say that Reagan played no role at all, but historians such as Fritz Bartel have stressed the importance of structural causes in the fall of the USSR. More specifically, amid the global stagflation of the 1970s, democracy and neoliberal capitalism emerged as the most effective means by which to impose economic discipline. These “were the best political and economic systems for breaking promises,” Bartel writes. Penny Von Eschen, for her part, laments the “obfuscating abstraction of the term [Cold War] itself.” For Von Eschen, “there is no singular version and no universally agreed on ending” to the Cold War, and “it is misleading to say”—as Reagan, I’d argue, does—“that the cold war ended when US-Soviet hostilities ceased.” A consummate Cold Warrior such as Reagan would love nothing more than to be remembered as the Man Who Brought Down the Evil Empire. Despite Reagan’s claims, though, he didn’t.
Beyond its relentless abuse of the historical record, Reagan is simply a terrible film. Director McNamara’s past filmography is extensive but full of schlock—Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday; a sequel to The Cutting Edge; a movie based on Bratz dolls. Reagan is painfully slow, far too long, poorly written, and stylistically inconsistent. It also gets bogged down by bizarre casting and song choices. While Dennis Quaid delivers a mostly solid (if unremarkable) performance as the title character, a steady parade of new, often inconsequential characters—played by C- or D-list stars, many with conservative tendencies—only add to the film’s chintziness. There’s Jon Voight, of course, but also Creed’s Scott Stapp as Frank Sinatra (!), Kevin Sorbo as Reagan’s boyhood pastor, and Entourage’s Kevin Dillon as film executive Jack L. Warner. The biopic, too, features cover songs performed by the likes of Bob Dylan, Gene Simmons, and Clint Black. The latter’s rendition of John Denver’s Appalachian anthem “Take Me Home, Country Roads” plays over scenes of Quaid’s Reagan riding horseback at his California ranch, as Alzheimer’s takes its toll. It is a curious selection that transforms a potentially poignant scene into a head-scratcher.
As Michael Rogin observed in the final years of Reagan’s presidency, the movies made Ronald Reagan—the actor, the president, and the icon. Reagan seeks to recapture and perhaps add to the myth and the legend, and it might just work for die-hard Reaganites with little appreciation for historical veracity or well-made films. The rest of us may find ourselves unwilling to forgive Reagan or Reagan for their many sins.
