The life of Ronald Reagan, our 40th president, was practically made for Hollywood, and not just because he spent many years there as an actor and in the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild. As I wrote today for the Daily Economy, his all-American story “demands a feature-length, biopic adaptation.”
A feature-length depiction of Reagan’s life, from boyhood to retirement, has finally arrived. Unfortunately, the eponymous film, directed by Sean McNamara and starring Dennis Quaid, is fundamentally flawed. Its structure — in which Reagan’s life is awkwardly narrated by a retired KGB agent (Jon Voight) instructing a present-day young Russian politician (Alex Sparrow) wondering why Russia lost the Cold War — hampers its story. And its substance is, at best, a stilted montage of Reagan’s life, and, at worst, superficial and didactic. You can read more in my review why Reagan “doesn’t even succeed as propaganda, as it doesn’t know how to transmit its message or even what that message really is.”
One reason Reagan fails as a movie is that it tells far more than it shows. As Phil Klein wrote, it suffers from a “failure to trust the audience” and from its “assumption that everything needed to be directly explained.” Because of this, the movie does not take advantage of some of the more vividly demonstrative incidents from Reagan’s own life. National Review‘s own William F. Buckley witnessed one, whose cinematic quality he recognized at the time he recounted it (1967):
I met him seven or eight years ago. He was to introduce me at a lecture that night at Beverly Hills. He arrived at the school auditorium to find consternation. The house was full and the crowd impatient, but the microphone was dead; the student who was to have shown up at the control room above the balcony to turn on the current hadn’t. Reagan quickly took over. He instructed an assistant to call the principal and see if he could get a key. He then bounded onto the stage and shouted as loud as he could to make himself heard. In a very few minutes the audience was greatly enjoying itself. Then word came to him: no answer at the principal’s telephone. Reagan went off-stage and looked out the window. There was a ledge, a foot wide, two stories above the street level, running along the side of the window back to the locked control room.
Hollywoodwise, he climbed out on the ledge and sidestepped carefully, arms stretched out to help him balance, until he had gone the long way to the window, which he broke open with his elbow, lifting it open from the inside and jumping into the darkness. In a moment the lights were on, the amplifying knobs turned up, the speaker introduced.
These and other defects compel me to dissent from the largely favorable assessments of Reagan by Rich Lowry and John Fund. I do not do so out of some disdain for Reagan himself. Quite the opposite: Reagan and his principles have an enduring relevance, whatever his modern critics might tendentiously assert. But it does not honor such a great man to produce a shoddy piece of propaganda about him.
Though it may please conservatives for a movie to take Reagan’s side, Reagan does this so ham-fistedly and incompetently that it shortchanges itself artistically and reduces its subject to a caricature. Yes, the Left has negatively caricatured Reagan for years. But the answer is not to respond with a superficially positive portrayal. Because that is what Reagan has done, it belongs in the category of movies explicitly marketed toward conservatives whose creators likely know their target audience, to which Hollywood seldom appeals, will overlook a product’s obvious defects and make patronizing it a political cause.
This kind of movie may profit a certain filmmaking niche. But it helps trap conservatives in a self-reinforcing cultural cul-de-sac, in which we see no need to attempt to appeal to a mass audience. Instead of trying to make transparently conservative art, conservatives should make good art that reveals the truths about history and human nature that we possess by virtue of our belief in a transcendent order. That is, conservatives should apply to their art the advice French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritan gave to Christian artists: “If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to ‘make Christian.’” The life of Ronald Reagan presented an incredible opportunity to do something like this. Unfortunately, Reagan squandered it.