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Does ‘Reagan’ the movie do justice to Reagan the president?
Reagan
Directed by Sean McNamara. Starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight, 2024. 135 minutes
There’s never been a major Reagan movie until 2024. Yet there’s a need for such storytelling. The most important American president of the 20th century after FDR is in danger of being forgotten with the change of generations, of political conflicts, and even of technology. Reagan was also the last president to become remarkably, lastingly popular and achieve major political victories, such that he is the standard against which to measure his successors.
Reagan (2024) had therefore the chance to be a memorable movie, to perform the most important function our art can perform, to improve the national memory. But even making such a movie is breaking a kind of Hollywood taboo, since cultural elites hated Reagan with a passion, possibly more than Nixon, since Reagan was the more successful.
And the movie does have the remarkable advantage of starring Dennis Quaid as Reagan and Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy, both of whom are solid in roles that are very difficult to persuade an audience to accept. Reagan was seen and heard by so many for so long on radio and TV that it’s hard to accept fictional substitutes.

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Reagan was a great president, but Reagan isn’t a great movie. It’s enjoyable, because it allows us to see Reagan’s life all over again, from childhood to retirement. But it attempts to tell his story from the point of view of a Russian KGB agent (played by Jon Voight) who had followed his career, and here the plot gets into trouble. It would have required a great writer to understand why civilized people would even consider the point of view of a murderous tyranny, but it is true that we do need somehow to understand our enemies. Reagan, however, cannot offer any idea about what made the Soviets redoubtable enemies, much less what humanity looks like beyond American borders.
Reagan is intended as a vindication of a man whose greatness has been denied by his political adversaries, whom he defeated in several elections, but who have proved the victors in perhaps a more important sense. The use of the fictional Soviet agent admitting that Reagan did win the Cold War is best understood as a swipe at those liberals who, like TIME in January 1990, declared Gorbachev the man of the decade.
But the movie takes for granted both Reagan’s victory and the audience’s remembering it. Thus, it can only succeed with retirees. Younger audiences are not aware of the conflicts of the 1980s, much less of Reagan’s career previous to the presidency.
The core of Reagan is anti-communism, the uniting of political commitment and activity in Reagan’s life from his days in the Screen Actor’s Guild to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The movie gets across this lifelong conviction and Reagan’s place in politics, but fails to convey the danger of communism, either foreign or domestic. The sequence of the movie suggests an argument that would add up to an attack on liberal elites in culture as slaves of ideology: communists in Hollywood in the 1940s, then hippies in the late 1960s—and they should have added the media in the 1980s. But Reagan doesn’t take this route, and thus misses the most important opportunity that comes out of its plot to explain Reagan’s domestic opposition.
This failure follows from the decision to replace Reagan’s politics with his rhetoric, and with the sunniest aspects of his rhetoric at that. We get a movie that softens both America and Reagan. That somehow corresponds to our desire to remember the good things, but it makes political conflict unintelligible. In a few bad moments, the movie suggests that Reagan’s showmanship saved America. But in fact it was arms and wealth and the willingness to use both. An audience persuaded by such an idealized vision would paradoxically be led to despair over our own situation, since they’d expect easy victories instead of the conflicts in the midst of which Reagan thrived.
As with America, so with Reagan. We get a man who was raised by a strong mother to be a good evangelical Christian, as well as to be tough; his father was an alcoholic, but the boy grew up unaffected, a strong, healthy lifeguard. The Great Depression doesn’t figure into the story, instead we cut to Hollywood. Neither in his upbringing, which is emphasized for our benefit as formative, nor in his professional activity do we ever come to understand Reagan. He’s presented as one of us, and perhaps better than most of us, but not as what he was, that rarest of things in America: a very successful president.
The movie does much better in showing Reagan’s romance with Nancy, which gave him the life he needed to be a politician. They meet cute in the context of anti-communism, but she quickly turns out to have a certain depth and to become his most loyal confidante. This, of course, creates a difficulty for the story, because one expects that Reagan talked to his wife about things he had to hide not just from voters but from his own cabinet, yet these things have wisely been concealed by that remarkable woman.
One final mistake is the sentimental conclusion: Reagan’s public statement about Alzheimer’s and his last horseback ride. A great movie would have ended with Reagan’s Farewell Address, a remarkable speech that deserves renewed attention, not least because it reminds us that Reagan was serious, realistic about achievements and failures, and prescient about the failure of patriotism, the political crisis in which we now find ourselves, the “culture war.”
The movie does something to show Reagan’s faith as well, from his boyhood choice to be baptized to his struggling to understand his destiny and find the confidence to act on the belief in providence, to his prayers with his friend Pat Boone and a pastor, played in the movie by Boone, in 1970. There is something in the movie that suggests Reagan was almost destined, but it would have taken a great director to achieve that. I thought of John Ford’s Young Lincoln.
One would have wanted to know more, since faith played in Reagan’s life the role that Progress played in the life of his adversaries, and it was disagreement in this regard that caused the endless hysteria of the 1980s. The strangest misinterpretation of Reagan that liberals indulged was that he was a warmonger, and the movie does well to dispel that. But in this regard, too, his ideological adversaries have advanced a position of remarkable hostility toward Christianity, and it is less obvious nowadays that a Christian leader could prove as popular and unifying as Reagan was. We need to understand why. Unfortunately, Reagan is little help there.
Where would you rank Ronald Reagan amongst American presidents?
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.
This review has been republished with permission from the Acton Institute website.
Image credits: reagan.movie
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-10-29 02:48:23 +1100Wonder if the film talks about his mishandling of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and how he let his friend Brock Hudson die because he was afraid of the stigma of helping out an AIDS patient. Or about how he decimated the middle class with his economy. Or how he arguably committed treason in Iran-Contra by going around congress to secretly sell arms to fund a war.
No, I don’t think this film covers any of that, and thus, does not do any justice to Reagan’s heinous legacy. -
mrscracker commented 2024-10-27 08:56:29 +1100Trade unions were useful in an earlier era Mr Steven. I’m not convinced they have quite the same relevance today.
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Steven Meyer commented 2024-10-27 08:47:21 +1100“But the economic advantages of union membership aside, what unions gave workers was dignity.”
Agreed.
And I cannot understand why American working-class men and women can’t see that.
How did this idea arise that it is some how not legitimate for working class men and women to contend for their own interests? It’s almost as if they hate themselves for being working-class.
To quote Rabbi Hillel:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?” -
David Page commented 2024-10-26 21:42:30 +1100Steven, I was a union organizer at one point. At one point my life was being threatened every day. That went with the territory. There was corruption to be sure, but nothing is as corrupt as Laissez-faire capitalism. Look what it has done to America? A tiny group of people own everything. And it starts with ownership of the government and the courts. Can you think of anything more corrupt than declaring that corporations are people, with all the rights that implies?
But the economic advantages of union membership aside, what unions gave workers was dignity. -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-10-26 17:42:59 +1100David Page,
There is another aspect to the decline of the working and middle classes and there’s no polite way of saying.
Their own stupidity.
Once upon a time trade unions protected the interests of not powerful against the greed of the powerful.
At this stage mrscracker will come in with some anecdote about how useless trade unions are.
And, certainly trade unions were not ideal institutions. They never were. Labour racketeering was rife. Some, like the Teamsters, were openly in bed with the mob and looted the Central States Pension Fund. But they did still perform a useful function and could do so again.
One way the trade unions acted as a counter to the wealthy is that they could deliver votes to the Democratic Party. The Dems became the party of the not powerful.
Until you find a way to counter the power of the corpocrats, the people who own/control large corporations, you are all going to suffer. The only way I can think of achieving that in practice is with a reformed and revitalised trade union movement.
Working class men and women have to be as bloody minded and ruthless about fighting for their interests as the corpocrats are in fighting for theirs. Nothing else will work.
Your forefathers were smart enough to understand this. They were smart enough not to be distracted by fake bogeymen like the “woke among the folk”. And they did not fall into the trap of thinking their own interests were less legitimate than those of a random billionaire. -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-10-26 14:10:51 +1100David Page,
In 1939 the German economy was on the brink of collapse. Hitler had financed the build up of his war machine through debt. The trouble was the debt was falling due. The German Central Bank, the Reichsbank, could repay the debt by printing the money; However, given Germany’s constrained circumstances, that would have risked an inflation of 1923 proportions. Not even the Nazi regime could have survived that.
So for Hitler and his war machine 1939 was the moment of use it or lose it. (Hjalmar Schacht spells this out in his book)
This was also the problem facing the Soviet Union. They had a huge war machine and rubbish economy and they faced collapse. So what would that monstrous empire do in its death throes? Would it go quietly? Or would it try one, last, desperate gamble to capture Europe?
It was to deter the Soviets that Reagan revitalised NATO and persuaded the NATO counties to raise their defence spending. It was the right move in the context of the times.
Domestically Reagan was a disaster area. But the problem was not Reagan alone. Jimmy Carter started deregulation. Other, subsequent presidents including Bush Snr, Clinton and Bush Jnr all followed policies that led to the effective de-industrialisation of the US. The ideological backing for this came from the likes of Milton Friedman and the Republicans largely captured by big business interests.
Ironically it is the guy who gets none of the credit, Joe Biden, who succeeded in reversing the trend. The “Inflation Reduction Act” – it should have been called the “inflation increase act” because rebuilding supply lines was always going to be expensive, was America’s first attempt in decades at a rational industrial policy.
An honest selling point would have been: You can choose to become an economic vassal of CCP ruled China or you can put up with some inflation." That’s a great over-simplification, there were other causes driving inflation in 2021-22, but it is broadly correct.
There is a perpetual problem:
Too much regulation, too much central control, kills an economy. This is what’s happening in China right now.
Too little regulation of critical areas combined with too much regulation of the wrong sort kills society. This is the problem in the US.
Getting the balance right is hard.
Marxists want total control.
Capitalists follow a sort “divine right or capitalists” ideology sometimes called Ayn Randism, want zero control of their activities.
So it goes. -
David Page commented 2024-10-26 09:26:53 +1100First; according to author Len Deighton, the Soviet Union was verging on collapse in the late seventies. Second; Reagan laid the groundwork for the collapse of the single earner family.
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mrscracker commented 2024-10-26 01:07:59 +1100I think Mr. Reagan’s quote was "I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help. "
:) -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-10-25 16:04:14 +1100Where would I rank Reagan among presidents.
Confining myself to presidents in my lifetime, would rank Truman and Eisenhower joint first with Reagan in third place.
I would rank Trump as the worst, Bush Jnr as second worst and Jimmy Carter as third worst.
In all cases I am looking at the men in the context of their times. None of them was all good and none of them, not even Trump, all bad. -
Steven Meyer commented 2024-10-25 15:56:16 +1100Reagan and Churchill have this in common with all great leaders. They were not men for all seasons. They were men for their season.
Churchill’s season was World War 2. Without that he would have been an interesting footnote. In 1945 the British public did him the favour of voting him out. He returned in the 1950s but as a figurehead. Had he won in 1945 he would have been a catastrophe. He would, for example have tried to hang on to the Empire which had passed its use-by date.
Reagan restored the West’s morale after the dreadful 1970s which included stagflation, a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the Nixon/Watergate debacle and NATO passivity in the face of a huge Soviet arms build-up.
His domestic policy was mainly just plain stupid. Memes like “Government is the problem” are both meaningless and destructive. Government can certainly be a problem. It often is.
But is is not THE problem. We need government. -
Emberson Fedders commented 2024-10-25 11:57:02 +1100I’m confused about how anyone could rate Reagan as a great president. He decimated the middle class.
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Titus Techera published this page in The Latest 2024-10-25 09:21:37 +1100