The gap between critics and theatergoers has never been bigger.
The gap between critics and theatergoers has never been bigger.
I f you need any more evidence that there is a gap the width of the Grand Canyon between the views of progressive elites and many average Americans, look no further than the reaction to Reagan, the new biographical film starring Dennis Quaid that launched in theaters last Thursday. Movie critics have done everything but pour boiling tar on the film and its makers. On the Rotten Tomatoes review site, Reagan earns a 20 percent “rotten” rating based on 46 reviews by critics.
The Daily Beast didn’t waste any time, slamming Reagan as “the worst movie of the year.” Boston critic Sean Burns calls it “a children’s story for the adult diaper set.” The AV Club claims that the film’s references to Reagan’s faith spring from its origins in the “christofascist content creation world.” Milder takes are that the film is shallow, idolatrous “historical hooey,” and a giant bore.
On the other side, the Rotten Tomatoes measure of audience appreciation (“Popcornmeter”) gives the film a 98 percent “fresh” score based on more than 1,000 verified film attendees. Reagan also scored big on two theatrical exit-polling sites, earning an “A” grade from CinemaScore and 4.5 stars from PostTrak. Ticket sales for the four-day Labor Day weekend are likely to come in at a very respectable $9.2 million.
We often see a divide between movie critics and the people in the theater seats. And when it comes to films with a political angle or a statement on controversial values, those gaps can be big. But of the approximately 15,000 films released in the quarter century of Rotten Tomatoes’ existence, there has never been a gulf between critics and audiences as vast as that for Reagan.
It’s unprecedented. Only four films since 1998 have seen a divide of 50 percent or more: Boondock Saints (65 percent), Super Troopers (54 percent), Venom (50 percent), and Uncharted (50 percent). The gap with Reagan is a stunning 78 percent.
Perhaps the dichotomy is explained in part by the fact that a big chunk of Americans have been waiting for just such a movie on Reagan. Previous efforts have sought to take down or tarnish the former president.
Most of Hollywood never forgave Reagan for becoming a conservative. Take Ida Lupino, the noted actress and director. She used to babysit Reagan’s children in the 1950s. But after he became a Republican in 1962, she never spoke with him again.
The films in which a Reagan character has made an appearance have reflected that bitterness. In 2003, CBS hired left-wing activist James Brolin, Barbra Streisand’s husband, to play Reagan in a three-hour miniseries. The left-wing New York Times got hold of an advance script and found several scenes, involving the Hollywood blacklist and AIDS, that it called “historically questionable.” CBS executives shunted the film to their Showtime cable channel, where it bombed.
That disaster kept Hollywood silent on Reagan for about a decade. Then, in 2016, only weeks after the death of Nancy Reagan, it was announced that Will Ferrell was going to star in a “comedy” about Ronald Reagan’s slipping into Alzheimer’s while president. Luckily, the outrage from Alzheimer’s-advocacy groups and the Reagan family forced Ferrell to abandon the project only two days after it was announced.
The disdain for Reagan in Hollywood is ironic. Reagan was a six-time president of the Screen Actors Guild, and in 1960 he was instrumental in leading its famous strike that won actors “residual” payments when films on which they had worked were sold to television. He also won the biggest increases ever in health-care and pension benefits for actors.
No, the hostility to Reagan isn’t rooted in fact or history. A Chicago critic put his anger at the film in clearly personal terms: “The only nightmares I remember having as a teenager were about an impending nuclear war, and I fully blame the cowboy politics of Ronald Reagan for those nightmares.” Others clearly believe that the one-time liberal Democrat became a traitor to Hollywood upon becoming conservative.
The film no doubt has a conservative message and spends time describing the effort by Communist-front unions to take over Hollywood in the 1940s. Actor Sterling Hayden, a former member of the Communist Party, said this attempt was thwarted in large part by Reagan — “a one-man battalion against this thing!”— while he was head of the Screen Actors Guild.
Reagan begins with a framing device: In the early 2000s an up-and-coming political star in Russia visits Viktor Petrovich, a KGB agent who was assigned to observe Reagan’s career from the 1940s through the 1980s. He wants to learn how Reagan and the U.S. defeated Communism and how they might thwart Russian ambitions again. Petrovich tells the Russian politician that he had constantly warned Moscow that Reagan was “a crusader” who would do grave damage to the Soviet empire. But he was largely ignored — until it was too late.
Mark Joseph, the producer of the new Reagan film, says he felt compelled to make the movie before Hollywood attempted once again to rewrite history. “Nobody knew him like his enemies did — and it’s through that lens that we tell the story. It’s impossible to understand the last century without understanding who Ronald Reagan was,” Joseph told me.
For his research, Joseph personally reviewed KGB and FBI files kept on Reagan. He interviewed more than 50 of Reagan’s friends, aides, and cabinet members. The script is based on two biographies by Reagan historian Paul Kengor and is personally endorsed by Ed Meese, Reagan’s close confidant and attorney general while he was president.
Of course, the filmmakers had to make choices. While Joseph was able to raise $20 million from private investors in order to prevent studio interference with his vision, the production values would have been better with a bigger budget. There is a bit too much reprising of Reagan’s greatest hits and quips in an attempt to appeal to an audience that was alive in the 1980s. Reagan’s failures are mentioned but not emphasized. The Iran-Contra scandal is clearly shown to be Reagan’s biggest presidential failure, and critics of his AIDS and homeless policies are given their due.
But even many of the film critics agree that Dennis Quaid impressively captures the Gipper’s essence, voice, and mannerisms. Quaid worked to refine the distinctive Reagan voice. “They offered me the part in 2018, and we didn’t start shooting until Covid in 2020. Great time to make a movie,” he told CBN News. “I basically talked like that for a year to my family. They had to put up with it, I guess.”
Michael Reagan, the president’s 79-year-old adopted son, says he is grateful to have lived long enough to see his father get his biographical due in a major motion picture. Writing at Red Bluff Daily News, he says it’s important for future generations that there is now a film that puts Reagan’s leadership and character in a positive light.
In King’s Row, Reagan’s favorite of the 68 films he made, his signature line was “Where’s the Rest of Me?’
Finally, Hollywood producers have given Reagan his due and delivered the first major film that indeed presents “the rest of him.”