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.