A full-length film on Ronald Reagan has been needed for some time. Reagan’s presidency changed the direction of this country in a way that progressives have never fully reconciled themselves with. The new film Reagan, directed by Sean McNamara and starring Dennis Quaid as the man himself, recently opened to decidedly negative reviews from major film critics. Even conservative film aficionados have been mixed on its quality and Quaid’s portrayal of Reagan. Some of the dismissals are the stuff of ideology, as movie critics probably had little desire for such a film, much less one that is a ringing endorsement of Reagan. The film’s creators have given themselves a large task with the style and manner of the project they executed. Those difficulties emerge in the film’s initial sequences.

　　Reagan opens with the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in Washington, DC. We are next treated to footage of Communism’s advance in Europe and the world in the twentieth century. The film then shifts to present-day Moscow where a fictional rising leader Andrei Novikov (Alex Sparrow) has been sent to the fictional Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight) to better understand the downfall of the Soviet Union. In a Putin-like fashion, Andrei announces to Viktor that the fall of Soviet Communism was an epic failure. Even worse, feckless Russian leaders just let it happen without any resistance.

　　Petrovich was a psychological profiler for the KGB on the Soviet Union’s external threats. He was assigned to study and assess Reagan in the 1940s when he assumed leadership of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and directly impeded the takeover of Hollywood labor unions by Communist thuggery. That got him noticed in Moscow. Early on we see Reagan the Crusader not only stopping Communism in its Hollywood tracks but communicating how and why Communism must be confronted to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Reagan states the nature of the Communist threat but doesn’t call for legal penalties to be imposed on Communists. He appeals to the constitutional value of free speech for dealing with Communist activism “because democracy can handle it.”

　　Petrovich takes us back to Dixon, Illinois to understand Reagan through his family, faith, and athleticism. Reagan’s mother, Nelle (Amanda Righetti) teaches her son that he has a divine purpose for his life, a theme evident throughout the film. Amidst the drunken failures of his father, Reagan asks his mother, “Why does dad drink so much whiskey?” Her answer: “To escape the memories of his failures and of what he will never become.” Reagan asks, “But does God have a purpose for Dad’s life?” Nelle answers yes, but also imparts that man must have faith and trust God to know this purpose.His father did not. She revisits this lesson to her son after the failure of his marriage to Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) when Reagan is struck by an apparent meaningless quality now attaching itself to his life. “I have lost everything,” he says, but Nelle tells him, “You must know the one whom you serve.” Her message: Nothing is lost, there is still everything to live for because it’s in God’s hands. This conversation may have been fictitious, but we know from Peggy Noonan’s biography of Reagan, When Character Was King (2002), that this was a very dark period in his life. He found a way through it. But the film chooses not to dwell overly on this episode and how it shaped Reagan. For that, read Noonan.

　　Reagan’s faith is a constant in the film, inspiring him in moments of doubt and leading him not only to run for governor of California and then for the White House but to read and study Communist ideology and what it does to the human spirit. One scene shows Reagan reading Whittaker Chambers’s Witness when Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller) enters the room and asks, “Are you going to stay out here all night with Whittaker Chambers?” (What could be better than a night spent reading Witness?) Nancy’s question prompts a conversation about how the Communists can be defeated once we understand the multiple currents that propel their project forward. Reagan relates to Nancy that he had to know the surface currents and the deeper currents that pulled people under when he was a lifeguard. America, Reagan says, is only dealing with Communism’s surface current, its weapons and armaments, but underneath this current is what drives Communism. Reagan had the answer, or at least he knew how to think more deeply about the problems Soviet Communism posed.

　　The film provides numerous scenes illustrating Reagan’s profound love for Nancy Davis whom he married in 1952. Miller’s portrayal almost always conveys overwhelming love and devotion to “Ronnie,” which some viewers might find cloying. But Nancy Reagan once said, “My life really began when I married my husband.” Her love for Ronnie was never something she doubted. Her protectiveness of Reagan is also noted in the film. Reagan’s fatigue and aging during his presidency are lightly broached. He is tired if not exhausted in the 1984 reelection campaign. In one scene, Nancy grows frustrated with campaign aides preparing Reagan for a debate with Walter Mondale. He stumbles in mock debates and takes time to rest. She exclaims to Michael Deaver (Stephen Guarino), “Why won’t you let Ronnie be Ronnie?”

　　One of the most honest and unintentionally timely film sequences depicts Governor Reagan’s visit with deans and faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 amidst widespread riots and violent protests. We see Reagan in full conservative mode—Ronnie is Ronnie—and you love every bit of it. He dresses down the administrators and the professors. One bearded faculty member states, “We tried to negotiate many times.” A visibly confused Reagan replies, “Negotiate, what is to negotiate? … All of it began when you let young people think they have the right to choose the laws they will obey as long as it’s in the name of social protest.” In short, you ceded your authority to these malcontented students, encouraging them or looking the other way while they engaged in acts of violence and destruction. We see Governor Reagan leave his meeting with the Berkeley representatives exasperated at grown men who have no confidence in their leadership, university, or civilization to face down a mob of leftist agitators and wannabe revolutionaries. He informs them, “I’m calling the National Guard.” Reagan sensed in 1969 what we know with stone-cold clarity in 2024: The guiding spirit of these deans and administrators in Reagan’s day and our own is the same death wish for our country that their ignorant students scream incessantly to the four winds.

　　The film largely treats Reagan as an almost Homeric figure who exists on a higher plane in wisdom and courage than his fellow mortals.

　　Enter Petrovich who informs the young ruler in training that the California-Berkeley standoff led him to notice something about Reagan. He was almost crazy, in a way that other American politicians were not. The California-Berkeley episode emphasized that Reagan would take dramatic action if he believed the situation called for it. Petrovich stresses this would be true throughout his political career. We also notice that his voice describing Reagan’s actions becomes warmer as the film progresses. This isn’t one of Voight’s better performances, but he still draws you in with his typical intensity.

　　We sense that Reagan has slowly pulled Petrovich out of Communist ideology. In his Reagan profiling, the KGB analyst discovered the human spirit, led by the American he supposedly feared the most. At one point, Petrovich yells at Andrei for equating Russian strength with Communism. He declares that Russia’s greatness was never in Communism but in its great literature where we learn about the soul. Images of saints of the Russian Orthodox Church adorn his apartment. Towards the film’s end, Petrovich states that Reagan “gave the people back what we took from them.”

　　But for all of this, Reagan as a film falls short. The film’s opening scenes reveal one of its main failures: it moves way too fast between themes, events, and facts of enormous importance for understanding Reagan. This deficiency is made even more glaring by the film’s desire to tell Reagan’s story through his presidency’s defeat of the Soviet Union. It assumes you, as the viewer, know that Reagan was destined to confront and destroy Soviet Communism, and you are primed to watch it on the big screen.

　　The film, done correctly, would implant from the beginning the how, the why, and the what of Reagan as the Soviet Union’s worst nightmare. Joe Wright’s The Darkest Hour performs this task superbly. That film opens with the downfall in Parliament of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s government, the anticipation of impending war with the Nazis looms in the Labor leader Clement Atlee’s speech, and it closes with a private question from one Conservative member to another: “Where’s Winston?” Flash to Winston at home in bed, soda scotch in hand along with breakfast, dictating a new speech on Germany’s invasion of France. Behold the man who will battle the Nazi beasts!

　　Instead, Reagan’s creators chose to build to such a point, assuming you know the film’s meaning, as it hops and skips through Reagan’s life on the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s as if the film wanted to proceed discursively.

　　We have the child Reagan, a virtuous young boy who listens to his mother, pities his drunken father, and chooses Christianity. He becomes a dedicated lifeguard, pulling dozens of people from the river for several summers. And the boy becomes a man, a college student and football player, and then a baseball announcer. Reagan is handsome, nimble, amusing, and able to thrive as an actor in Hollywood. He gradually accumulates the skills that will enable him to be a national savior, a crusader, willing to step into the storm of troubles besetting America in the 1980s and quiet them.

　　We sense that the film’s creators have acted with the noblest of intentions. They wanted to make a film that would give us the essential cinematic Reagan, reigniting interest, particularly in our youth, in Reagan’s love for America and his belief in our constitutional republic. The film hits every significant Reagan speech, emphasizing the quotes that conservatives know in their bones. Strangely, they omit the one speech that kept Reagan alive for presidential victory in 1980, the impromptu address at the 1976 GOP Convention where he was defeated on a floor vote at the convention by President Gerald Ford. Ford invited him to offer a few words, which Reagan did by combining nuclear weapons policy with American wisdom and confidence such that many in attendance instantly regretted the decision to pass over Reagan. People were visibly moved by his intervention. This speech carried him into the 1980 campaign as the Republican leader. But the film instead chooses to show him in his hotel suite wondering why it was “God’s will” that he lost.

　　Reagan attempts too much and misses the opportunity to prove the wisdom of “the Gipper.” The film largely treats Reagan as an almost Homeric figure who exists on a higher plane in wisdom and courage than his fellow mortals. Did everyone around Reagan see him in this mode? Conversations between Reagan and other characters frequently come off more like dictated outcomes rather than give and take. The characters almost seem to wait for Reagan to tell them the answer or the lesson.

　　What is our hero’s shadow? Surely, he had one. The great disappointments of Reagan’s life are not overlooked but are also presented as events that were acted upon him. A man possessed with his indomitable will, strength, courage, and faith, must have also felt the demons within. A more captivating picture would have shown how Reagan overcame these troubles and triumphed. The closest we come is watching a middle-aged Reagan doubt himself after performing in a low-rent advertising spot for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in a Las Vegas show. He is embarrassed to even take Nancy with him. Standing in front of the Las Vegas club at night, seeing his name on such an unimportant stage, we know he’s consumed with pain over past choices and mistakes, wondering what’s next. His fear erupts as he smashes a beer bottle. But Reagan never explodes onto the screen, it gurgles out, a missed opportunity.