Reagan Movie: A Controversial Vision of the 40th President

The film’s treatment of its topic is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.

The Reagan moves well beyond hero worship, as it paints the 40th U.S. president as a saint among men. The film opens with Ronald Reagan (Dennis Quaid) quoting his mother via voiceover. “Everything, even seemingly random twists of fate, is all a part of the divine plan.” This happens just as it cuts to a vision of John Hinckley Jr.’s 1981 attempted assassination of the president. The mix of slow-mo re-enactment and archival footage is the first of many bizarre, unintentionally funny moments. The film is determined to position Reagan as the great man of the second half of the 20th century. It also aims to depict him as a man ordained by God. He is seen as the one to defeat the colossal, religion- and freedom-hating villain of our times: communism.

In an especially strange decision, the story of Reagan’s life is told from the perspective of a fictionalized KGB agent. This agent is Victor Novikov (Jon Voight). He amusingly shares the same name as a Russian oligarch target from the video game Hitman 2. In the present day, Novikov regales a young Russian agent (Alex Sparrow) who wonders how the U.S.S.R. lost the Cold War. He shares tales of Reagan’s personal and political history. He presents Reagan not merely as an admirable adversary. Reagan is portrayed as a near-invincible foe who earned the initially sarcastic nickname “The Crusader.”

Reagan was inspired by Paul Kengor’s 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. The ever-present Christian overtones suggest the filmmakers also drew from Kengor’s book from the year before. God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life. A focus on Reagan’s spirituality could have been at least somewhat compelling were it presented with any complexity or depth. But the film is written by Howard Klausner. He is the co-screenwriter of Michael Mason’s risible Christian drama God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness from 2018. It’s unsurprising that Reagan doesn’t so much interrogate its subject’s faith. Instead, it bludgeons the audience with the notion that it was the defining force behind his success and greatness.

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Throughout, people remind Reagan that he serves God, with certain comments. For example, his mother tells him that “God has purpose for your life, something only you can do.” Such statements outright deify him. To be fair, the Russians are no less one-dimensionally imagined. They strategically infiltrate Hollywood and the labor unions as a means to destroy God and freedom. The film obtusely sees both God and freedom as completely synonymous with America. It’s no surprise, then, that every Russian but Mikael Gorbechev is presented as pernicious and heartless.

Far more troubling than the comically villainous portrait of Russia is the film’s relentlessly condescending vision of Reagan’s detractors. The film also has a duplicitous view of them over the years. University of California, Berkeley protesters in 1969 are depicted as whiny brats emboldened by a weak, naïve, and idealistic faculty and administration. Even more offensive and distasteful than that is the film’s playing of Ronnie’s “shhh” to the silent protestors as a joke, only to skip over the one death and 128 hospitalizations that resulted from his sending in the National Guard soon after.

Every pro-union liberal in McNamara’s film is shown as an unthinking, freedom-hating Russian puppet willing to turn violent whenever they don’t get their way. And each politician and member of the press calling for accountability in the Iran–Contra affair is driven not by a sense of morality or justice, but a bloodthirsty desire to destroy Reagan’s career.

Even if it’s only to present Reagan as an unwitting victim, that the scandal is mentioned at all is shocking, given the sheer number of other contentious issues that defined his presidency that are overlooked. There’s no mention of the War on Drugs and, in a fittingly ironic tribute to the Reagan administration’s silence and inaction during one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, the film stays mum on the AIDS crisis. As for trickle-down economics, the film’s puerile position is summed up when Ronnie offers up a choice bit of charming, folksy wisdom: “If the good lord only asks for 10%, why should Uncle Sam ask for any more?”

It’s not only Reagan’s belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious treatment of its subject, and the sociopolitical realities that he lived through, that makes it so excruciating. It’s also the unwavering smugness with which it presents its warped vision of reality as fact, along with the utter contempt it shows for anyone who wasn’t completely in Reagan’s corner.