• Reporter 21
• 29 Aug, 2024

If you knew little or nothing about Ronald Reagan and you were to form your opinion of our 40th president on the content of the hagiographic “Reagan,” you would come away believing he single-handedly saved the Screen Actors Guild from being overrun by communists, was the most loving husband this side of George Bailey, was always the most charming man in any room, and sailed through eight majestic years in office with only a whiff of scandal or setback.

Not to say there isn’t a measure of validity in at least some of those assessments, but the truth is more subtle and debatable than what director Sean McNamara puts forth in “Reagan,” which was adapted by Howard Klausner from Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.” This is a competently made film with decent cinematography and production design, and the casting is never less than ... interesting, but it favors a simplistic approach and a narrative that verges on adoration. I mean, we actually see Ronald Reagan riding off into the sunset in this movie.

A lacquer-haired, rosy-cheeked Dennis Quaid looks and sounds like Dennis Quaid impersonating Ronald Reagan in the title role, as “Reagan” opens in March of 1981 with a re-creation of the assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr.

The story then shifts to “Moscow, Russia, Present Day,” and this is where the film makes the curious choice of having a fictional, retired KGB officer named Viktor Ivanov (Jon Voight, with a borderline cartoonish Russian accent) act as the de facto narrator of the film. A young, up-and-coming Russian politician (Alex Sparrow) visits Ivanov to gain an understanding of how the Soviet Union collapsed, and as it conveniently turns out, Ivanov devoted much of his career to following and studying the life of one Ronald Reagan, and he believes studying Reagan is the key to deciphering how the Americans defeated communism.

“To understand what made this man unique, I needed to understand the boy,” says Ivanov, and that’s the cue for a flashback to young Ronnie (played by Tommy Ragen as a boy and David Henrie as a teenager) growing up in Dixon, Illinois, and off we go on a sweeping epic that spans the entirely of Reagan’s life, unlike many recent historical biopics that concentrate on one specific and vital period. (As Ivanov guides us through the decades, some of his observation are howlers, e.g., “As they say in America, Brezhnev’s mind was blown.”)