Ronald Reagan's Struggle Was Real - But Not in This Film

The Reagan Film and the Problems of Political Art

This review of the film Reagan is a guest contribution by Joseph Holmes.

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A movie about Ronald Reagan is a long time coming. Unfortunately, both the good and bad of the Reagan film reflect much of the good and bad in American politics - and the conservative movement in particular - today.

Hollywood has a long history of lionizing American presidents. Both fictional, like James Marshell (Harrison Ford) in Air Force One or Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) in Independence Day, and real, like Kennedy in 13 Days and Lincoln in Speilberg’s Lincoln. But this lionization is largely partisan. Nixon and Dick Cheney are portrayed as straight-up villains in movies like Frost Nixon and Vice and George W. Bush is a joke in W.

This is probably why, despite how consequential and beloved Reagan was to America’s history and how many Hollywood-ready moments he has in his story, it’s taken so long for us to get a Reagan film. But now, with the rise of explicitly conservative entertainment, such as with The Blaze and The Daily Wire, it was only a matter of time before that changed. So, in 2024, we have the film Reagan.

The movie stars Dennis Quaid (The Parent Trap, I Can Only Imagine) as President Ronald Reagan, in a film that follows the 40th  president of the United States in his lifelong battle with communism from his childhood to the end of his life through the eyes of Ex-KGB officer Viktor Petrovich (John Voight).

Reagan had a long and winding road to the big screen. Producer Mark Joseph, who produced the film independently, outside the regular Hollywood system, has been trying to get the film made for over 10 years, with difficulty securing financing, the death of the original director John Avildsen, and COVID-19 causing significant delays. Finally, it secured a release date after being acquired by the newly launched distributor Showbiz Direct.

It’s fitting that the film should come out in 2024 with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.  Comparisons between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are easy to make. They both are entertainers who became politicians. They both had a classic Hollywood vision of masculine swagger. They both framed their presidency in the form of an existential threat to America from communists. Both established, at least in their rhetoric, a marriage between profound religious faith and traditional values with love for freedom, individual rights, and free markets. And, in a coincidence that the filmmakers could not have foreseen when they were making this movie, both survived assassination attempts.

Their appeal to their fans also comes from the same place. As this movie shows, one of the things Reagan’s fans loved about him was how he stood up to his enemies without backing down. “We win, they lose” as he says in the film about the Soviet Union. Likewise, Donald Trump’s fans love him for the same reason, whether it’s him standing up to “Marxists” or the “woke left”. They both fight their enemies with the kind of cocky attitude you might see from James Bond in Reagan’s era or Tony Stark in ours.

There are plenty of things to like about this movie. Firstly, it’s refreshing to see the side of American culture that Reagan depicts onscreen in a positive light. A huge part of American culture is a mostly uncynical love for the values of faith, family, and freedom. Yet, quite often these are depicted cynically (such as Andrew Shepherd in Aaron Sorkin’s The American President) or only partially (Michael Bay movies typically love the flag and freedom but ignore faith). The movie portrays Reagan’s mom instilling those values in him very early on, and throughout the movie we watch him try to apply them. And when he does, the movie cheers for it. Because this is the disposition of so many Americans, there’s a certain dignity that this movie gives them by having that particular cocktail of values celebrated onscreen.

The performances are all very solid. Dennis Quaid captures Reagan’s gravitas and infectious affability while always remaining grounded. John Voight is charming as an old former communist. Penelope Miller is a standout, balancing warmth, passion, and stability through the wild events in her and Reagan’s lives while all feeling like the same person.

The big problem with the movie is its allergy to struggle. The movie is not so much a story as a highlight reel strung together by an ex-KGB operative fangirling over Ronald Reagan for two and a half hours. John Voight will narrate and tell us about Reagan’s struggles, but the movie rarely shows them except in passing, giving us little chance to feel them for ourselves. Often this merely results in the movie feeling boring. Other times the highlight reel method unintentionally ends up making Reagan look like a jerk. Like when he calls in the National Guard on the student protestors without sufficiently setting up why the student protestors were so bad.

One of the most consistent flaws of storytelling that I’ve found in faith-based films is this very allergy to conflict and struggle. Films like Likemark, Jesus Revolution, Ordinary Angels, and rush through the times when things are going badly and focus their time on the highs and where things are going well. It’s not that they say that there’s no struggle that happens, except implied in movies like Lifemark, but they simply skip over those parts. It’s one of the reasons that the movies are so boring.

The fact that movies with more anticipation than resolution are more enjoyable is not just my opinion, it’s built into how our brains were designed. As Dr. Andrew Huberman explained to Dr. Jordan Peterson, our brains experience the greatest joy in the lead-up to getting what we want. We actually take a slight dip in happiness when we finally do get it. Therefore a movie that is one success after the other is just much more boring than one that builds up to those moments.

But there’s a deeper moral problem with movies that skip the struggle and go to the reward. They make us weak. It’s been noted that one of the costs of this “Dopamine Addiction” of needing our life to be a constant streak of “highs” is our inability to cope with “normal human anguish” of ordinary life. In short, it makes us mentally weak. As author Ian Harber writes:

The effect of this dopamine addiction is the erosion of someone’s ability to handle Normal Mental Anguish. It’s hard to explain to a dopamine addict that life is hard and full of mental anguish—and that’s normal. It seems as though the category of Normal Mental Anguish is basically gone and the options are essentially some persistent ethereal Zen-like state or a diagnosable yet hardly treatable mental illness. The quickest way to live an unhappy life is to believe in the Zen/Illness binary and not believe that Normal Mental Anguish is a normal part of life and that experiencing it doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

Once we can’t handle normal human anguish, we can’t do any of the things that make life worth living, or support civilization. We can’t raise children, go to church, or govern ourselves. We become people who, as James Davison Hunter observed of Americans in his book The Change the World, expect the government to do everything for us.

It’s ironic that conservatives, Reagan’s target audience, would make a movie so bad at glorifying the struggle when they so often preach the value of hard work. I suspect it’s a matter of compartmentalization. They work hard in their own lives, but when they sit down to watch a movie, they want to be entertained and relax from their labor. So they don’t connect the experience of storytelling with the experience of their own lives. This is a gap that must be breached if conservatives are ever going to make great art.  

This is particularly sad because, story-wise, there’s also a lot of potential here. Reagan’s early years where he watched his extremely talented father drown in alcohol the regrets of not living up to his dreams, and trying desperately, often in vain, to avoid the same fate, were deeply compelling. The scenes where his mom is trying to explain that God has a purpose for Reagan and he asks “Did God have a purpose for dad too?”, where Jim Warner gets him to stand up to the communists because this is “an opportunity to do something great”, and him as a washed-up actor in Vegas having a smoke, were like gut punches emotionally and some of the best parts of the movie.

A film that built on these moments would have had a very strong character journey. The story of a man who wants greatness because he saw what mediocrity did to his father, and is confronted by his friends and enemies as to whether he is putting the country in danger, not for the greater good, but to satisfy his own ambition, and therefore have to wrestle with that question within himself. That would have the potential to be–dare I say it–a great movie.

But here’s where our toxic political climate also undermines good art. Nobody wants to admit flaws in their political heroes. Whether that’s the insistance by fans of President Obama that he never had a scandal during his presidency besides a tan suit, or Trump supporters who attack pro-life Christians like Lila Rose for criticizing President Trump’s increasingly pro-choice rhetoric and policy signaling. Any criticism is considered to give ammunition to the enemy, and therefore a betrayal.

Of course, it doesn’t take long to realize that this fear is obviously unfounded when it comes to movies. American Sniper forced Chris Kyle to wrestle with how much of his constant war touring was due to heroism and how much was to not deal with other problems. Darkest Hour forced Winston Churchill to confront whether his refusal to compromise with Nazi Germany was noble or pig-headedness. Yet not a single person I know walked away from either of those movies without a greater admiration for those people than when they walked in.

I get it. Conservatives are so used to being unfairly vilified onscreen they are tired of it. They’re afraid that any flaw portrayed in their heroes gives ammunition to their enemies. But this is one of those cases where I have to quote Dune and say “Fear is the mind-killer”. You can’t let fear get in the way of the truth. And you can’t let fear get in the way of good art.

Conservative author Spencer Klavan argues that getting rid of this fear is the chief thing that conservatives need if they’re ever going to make good art. As he says:

If we’re serious about a revival, we are going to have to accept the inherent risk and unpredictability that comes from letting artists see the world before they judge it. In turn, we are going to have to learn to suspend our own judgment long enough to see what the artists bring us for what it is. In other words, we will have to cultivate a little taste.

This obviously isn’t just a problem with conservative political art. The reason that Adam McKay’s movies keep getting worse and worse, from The Big Short to Vice to Don’t Look Up, is that he refuses to see how anyone who disagrees with him might not be stupid or evil. Therefore his satire isn’t insightful. But for every Adam McKay, there are at least 10 Aaron Sorkins. So far nearly every conservative filmmaker is another Adam McKay.

Ignoring parts of the truth you don’t like is a bad idea in the real world too - not just in art. There’s a reason that Jesus said “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24-25) It’s because reality always wins. When you build your political party or your life based on lies or half-truths, it makes you vulnerable to those parts of your life crashing down when reality re-asserts itself, because they are not built on reality.

Art is supposed to make sense of the world we live in, and politics is a huge part of our lives. Therefore there is a real need to make art about politics. Hopefully, filmmakers can continue to make movies that express our best political instincts rather than our worst ones. Because what movies express they also encourage.

Joseph Holmes is a film critic in New York City.