A Review of "Reagan" (2024) by Sean McNamara
Hated by Leftist Critics, Loved by Audiences, where does this ode to Reaganism belong?
On a purely ideological level, I am giving this movie a 100/100, A+.
Why? Because it’s not typical Hollywood trash advancing a suicidal foreign element into your brain that makes the sinners saints, all cops criminals, and sanctifies heresy.
It’s 2024 and our standards are hitting new lows.
Conservatives love to complain about the lack of ‘conservative movies’ and then when one finally does come out, love to act like Siskel & Ebert deconstructing the movie’s flaws to death.
It’s the virtue signaling of high standards I suppose. I pushed my hypocrisy on this point until the last half of the piece.
“Reagan” gets right what you want movies to get right: the underlying message, theme and the positivity and joy that constitutes the motivation for most to go to the movies: escapism.
It presents a visualization of what was a political strategy of winning wars through intelligence and sincerity rather than through neoliberalism’s endless wars. It suggests that speaking the truth about evil is more compelling than the left’s near-century of moral blindness and acquiescence to Soviet terror and brutality.
Tell a shitlib that Reagan won the Cold War by ‘winning their hearts and minds’ and watch them explode with fury.
The movie argues moral clarity trumps sophistry. If ever an age needed a message, ours needs that one the most.
Those are timely messages and were well-worth the effort in making this movie, and in watching it.
Reagan delivers on these basic premises, and provides a 2 hour 15 minute runtime of nostalgia and sentimentality for a time when one could believe that our leaders could truly change the course of America and the world through their passionate attachment to the truth. At several points Reagan implores his mother, friends, pastors, that he felt like he could and should do more, and was then given the chance to do so.
In our much more cynical age, we understand more about the psychology of cowardice found in most elected officials, the deep state that manages affairs and directs conclusions, the lobbyists who similarly steer and manage political processes, and the often mixed motives hidden behind many of these sweet-sounding policies.
Reagan offers a convenient simplicity that romanticizes the idea that one man with courage makes a majority.
These are the things that make it shine.
But, as with Reagan the man, there are many problems.
Leftists have seized onto these problems and lay them bare. It’s the only truth they have to offer about the movie: its technical failures.
Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” hated it.
Millionaire Sulzberger family’s the NYT hated it.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post hated it.
Yet 98% of those normal folks, the plebes, the mere workers, who watch it, liked it according to its score on “Rotten Tomatoes.”
I’m always amused by these inverted critic/audience scores, where the critics are of one solid opinion against something, and the people are of one solid opinion in the reverse direction.
There’s an 80 point difference between the audience and critics on this movie. That alone should be newsworthy.
I found this list of movies with similar spreads between critics and audiences, and this top ten list of movie spreads has the number 1 selection as the Boondock Saints at only a 65 point spread, 26 to 91.
Yet this 2004 documentary on Reagan, “In the Face of Evil,” has a 75 point spread between critics and audiences.
For further context, here’s a Reddit thread where it outlines this scenario, and the spread even among these cherry-picked examples is only about 25-30 points off. So the average spread on anything Reagan related has one thing in common: the leftists who control criticism and culture will hate it.
What’s happening here is that left-wing reviewers simply can’t be bothered to even watch or entertain this movie. They’d rather prefer that it does not exist at all. This is part of the liberal playbook of dispossession and outright suppression.
The problem with all of this is that the liberals aren’t all wrong. To quote Reagan himself, ‘they just know so many things that aren’t true.’
On a very technical level, the Reagan movie is poorly made and poorly executed. The leftist reviewers have seized on this point ad nauseam and are falling over themselves to preen on in reviews about their technical film expertise that they would have brought to bear… if they could stomach the subject.
The first half of this movie is a bit of cringe porn. You should see it in the theaters for this reason, so that you feel impelled to stick with it through the halfway point.
The acting is very rough, and the scenes kind of plod by very roughly. Jon Voight’s fake Russian accent, and the entire premise of a young KGB agent visiting an older one, who retells him stories from being a spy in America assigned to watch Reagan, could not be more contrived. It’s mainly just a way to cheat some exposition into the script.
But it’s just hard to dislike anything Jon Voight does.
The movie, as the left notes in every negative review, is a haiography. There is no struggle it presents, no challenge that Reagan faces, no journey where he must overcome adversity.
The challenges he faces in the movie are the same blithe ones from superhero movies: the hero must choose to keep being great and use their powers for good. That’s it.
Reagan was no Reagan, however, and the movie could have benefitted from a lot more criticism from the right.
Reagan was pro-immigration and his 1987 amnesty for three million illegals set the stage for the open borders that would become enshrined in U.S. policy in the 1990s under Clinton. Reagan’s policies, but also his public statements to this effect, set the immigration restriction movement back two generations.
Reagan’s last speech as President has been described as a ‘love letter’ to immigrants. That myopia or insanity would help undo America within a generation, would bring crime and misery to many cities, and would permanently enshrine left-wing majorities in many key Republican states.
This one volitional choice almost singlehandedly ensured the quick demise of Reaganism as a political movement, and certainly as a cultural force.
Mexican illegals were never going to push for tax cuts and strong defense policies. They were going to push for more Mexicans and more money to Mexican-friendly programs.
Even though Reagan portrayed himself as a family man, albeit a divorced one, by most accounts he was a distant, workaholic parent, whose biological children were so confused that his daughter Patti posed for Playboy in 1994, and his son Ron is now a childless left-wing atheist former ballet dancer constantly counter-signaling Trump on MSNBC.
Patti later claimed she was sexually abused by a music executive in 1978, while writing an editorial supporting the obviously false accusations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
To some extent every political leader ought to be assessed by the quality of their offspring. How can you be a great leader, after all, if you are a completely failed parent?
The Reagan administration had the chance to not just outspend the Soviet Union, but to do more.
Sometimes ‘doing more’ could have been done by simply doing nothing.
If Reagan Department of Justice employee Ken Starr had simply made a required single phone call to Arizona Right to Life in 1981, for example, Sandra Day O’Connor’s rule on the Supreme Court for a generation would have been avoided. Not appointing O’Connor would have been better.
Politica classic - Opposition to Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981
How did the Reagan revolution end up being transferred to the Bush family of all people? Was it filled with internal compromises from the start that would ensure its speedy defeat? The Bush family immediately dispossessed all of the Reagan people from the government the moment they had power, and have been steadily doing so since they took the reigns.
Reaganism could win re-election with 49 states, but it couldn’t handle Lee Atwater and James Baker?
I don’t think this movie took many chances. It didn’t try to invent or fictionalize anything related to Reagan. It didn’t amplify his positives, it didn’t comment on his negatives, it felt like a fictional non-fiction, it was equal parts narrative and documentary.
It doesn’t mention at all that Reagan could have ended Roe v. Wade a generation earlier if he had ensured that Robert Bork, for example, was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
The movie ignores the fact that Reagan ran record deficits because he trusted Democrats to keep their promises.
These kind of complaints might seem like a case of impossible standards, where the man who was on a mission to end Communism, and who to some extent realized that amazing vision, didn’t also make the trains run on time.
But even here the movie makes clear that fighting Communism was both a foreign and domestic battle. Reagan knew all too well that there were plenty of Communists in Hollywood and in the Unions and on the college campuses.
Did they stop being Communists because Reagan cut their taxes?
Did they renounce Marxism once Moscow had a McDonalds?
Did Communist infiltration of American institutions stop or slow because of the personal confidence, charm, and charisma of the star of “Cattle Queen of Montana”?
One rarely discussed part of Reagan’s charm is that he did weaponize it to destabilize the Soviet Union, through humor and ridicule. Reagan skillfully deployed constant jokes at the Soviet’s expense, and I suspect the effort had great political consequence that rarely goes acknowledged. This movie didn’t make a novel new claim like that, it instead relied on the passive and heavily trodden ground laid down by Paul Kengor.
Kengor is a good author and a good center-right scholar, but many of his books seem like they are cheerleading pieces, and lack any appreciable criticism of their subjects.
And Reaganism, for all of its marketing and all of its appeal, was still just a speedier version of what, by 1980, was an inevitable collapse of Soviet economics and failing political systems. “We win, they lose” is an excellent political formulation, but it also overlooks a great deal of “what comes next.”
And what came next was George Bush Sr., and then eight years later, George Bush Jr. - the RINO faction of the Republican Party would be in firm control of the right side of American politics until Donald Trump came along in 2016, and even there, they have quickly and adroitly mastered their ability to weasel and worm their way into power, displacing any conservatives.
The RINOs won’t fight the left, but they will fight the right all day, every day. We will even be fighting them in hell someday.
These charlatans had control because there was no other heirs apparent that had been developed and groomed by Reaganism.
The nation has suffered greatly as a result.
Reagan did not expand the political leadership, and did not grow the kind of leaders needed to fundamentally change and shift America. This ought to be the most stinging indictment of Reaganism: here was a man who had these values, and was always content to be the only leading man for that movement. He did not grow the garden of leaders ready and willing to come in his wake.
Reagan’s term was their apex, and he did not set them up to do great things after he left office.
Reagan was a political revolution and not a true cultural revolution. This makes a later cultural adaptation to hype and praise that political revolution, so incomplete and lacking. The left was able to out-culture the Reagan Revolution, because it stood on these commanding heights producing cultural content.
This is why those currently in cultural power in America will overcorrect to ensure that Reaganism has no cultural dividend. It cannot be allowed to help the people who are meant to be deleted and suppressed.
Reaganism needed a Producer and instead it ended up with just an Actor.
What this movie really needed was more time spent perfecting the story, and refining exactly what message it was intending to send.
Reagan deserves to be celebrated for collapsing Communism, earlier and more severely than once thought possible. Reagan deserves credit for forcing the Soviets to spend money they didn’t have, and institute reforms they could not live with, which caused their collapse. But that cancer was not cured, it only metastasized and spread elsewhere.
The movie does not suffer from many overt historical inaccuracies. Now I’m sure plenty of poorly-educated film critics will say otherwise, but the film did a good job generally hewing to the facts on various Reagan incidents and initiatives. But it’s accuracy here is almost to the detriment of the story. It would have been better to invent a few facts, or smudge a few dates, in order to advance the underlying interest of the story’s primacy.
A movie is a simple medium. It’s the visualization of an idea, usually told through the captive two hour story of one protagonist. It’s not a book, it’s not a poem. It’s a visual medium where people want a tale, a good yarn, that resonates in their life and is powerful.
This movie came so close to being that, it came so close it could almost taste the greatness.
There might be merit to this hyper-factual approach among hardcore folks looking to denigrate the movie for supposed historical inaccuracies.
Instead, I think it was a mistake from the pre-production work necessary on a work like this. Instead of capturing the essence of a moment, or why a monumental change happened, the movie kind of hits certain benchmarks all the way through making sure we capture many accurate and truthful moments, but never really making it into a coherent story.
It was reminiscent, in a way, how the director Zach Snyder treated the adaptation of the Watchmen comic into a film: by faithfully and painstakingly reconstructing key moments from the comic, but never worrying about what the message became. It was a form of fan service masquerading as cinema.
In the 2009 Watchmen, Director Snyder faithfully recreated key moments from the story, and they looked visually brilliant, but the story was completely incoherent. There was no story other than a progressive film carousel giving you moving stills that didn’t tell a story.
On some level, the medium of a story is an integral part of the story.
In Reagan, Director Sean McNamara took Paul Kengor’s book and put it on film. He made sure to take 3-5 minute scenes and ensured that every key scene was accurate and well-made. That makes a movie, but it doesn’t make for a good story.
What we lose in this translation is the point, the underlying connective tissue. It’s there, you can find it, but it isn’t told through the story.
It’s just a poorly written and thought-out movie. The scenes are good, the acting is at times awful and other times powerful, but the movie itself needed more time in pre-production perfecting its lines and curating its excesses.
It would have been so much better to start with the pivotal scene of Reagan demanding Gorbachev come to the Berlin Wall and tear it down. The scene is well-featured in the movie, but there is no context as to the suffering of Berliners and Germans during this period of time, and no explanation of the evils from which Soviets were daily terrorizing civilians.
Doing so would have required the entire movie be restructured around the fall of the Berlin Wall though. It would have required minimizing Jane Wyman, and ignoring the union issues, it would have focused the story and would have provided a much better flow, pace, and structure.
Now, the movie has great, powerful, touching moments. The way in which McNamara decided to handle the ending, combining it with Reagan’s powerful going away letter to America, was very touching and powerful. But the power of that one scene wasn’t coherently captured throughout the entire movie.
Was Reagan a cowboy? Was his life a love story about Nancy as ‘broken people’? There are so many subplots that get awkwardly shoehorned into this movie, that its distracting. It’s attempting to do too much, way too much, at the expense of a great story.
There was also some solid acting, despite weak performances by Quaid and Voight.
David Henrie as teenaged Ronald Reagan gave a very strong performance.
All in all, this was a great movie. It’s a triumph it was ever made. The messages within are its strongest attributes. And the poor quality of the movie is definitely front-loaded. If you start watching this movie and don’t like it, stick it out past the halfway mark and it will markedly improve.
Reagan, much like the real Reagan, leaves much to be appreciated, and much to be desired.
