“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” challenged Ronald Reagan in his historic speech before the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987.  The Cold War was careening toward a massive American victory and Reagan’s righteous delivery of the line remains one of the conflict’s most iconic moments. In November 2019, on the 30^th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, a bronze statue honoring the 40^th president was unveiled near the site of speech, despite rising tensions in America’s relationship with the united Germany of the 21^st century and steady attempts by the academic left to deny Reagan any credit for his Cold War victory. Sean McNamara’s biopic Reagan, released on Aug. 30, adds to the hagiography but offers little by way of reflection.

Reagan has long been in gestation. The film’s original concept emerged in 2010, in reaction to the widely panned CBS television miniseries The Reagans (2003), which painted Reagan and his first lady, née Nancy Davis, in a negative light. Closely following the conservative political scientist Paul Kengor’s book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2006), McNamara’s film is less an introspective personal history than an illustrated narrative telling how Reagan formed his attitude toward communism in 1940s Hollywood and later developed a political career to defeat it, both at home and abroad.

Overwhelmingly liberal Hollywood could hardly be expected to produce a film lionizing a Republican president. Producer Mark Joseph struggled to find financing. The project ultimately obtained generous independent support from anonymous investors and gathered an enthusiastic creative team. McNamara, who was hired to direct in 2016, worked as a sound engineer at Reagan’s first inauguration in 1981, when he was only 18. Dennis Quaid, who takes on the starring role, is a former political independent who has long identified Reagan as his favorite president and now supports former president Donald J. Trump’s reelection bid. The conservative actor Jon Voight, who was first associated with the project as early as 2012, plays the role of Viktor Petrovich, a fictional KGB agent invented by screenwriters Howard Klausner and Jonas McCord to narrate Reagan’s story, based on the agent’s make-believe career assignment to keep tabs on Reagan from his time as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Despite only a brief COVID pandemic interruption, however, the film still took nearly four years to reach the silver screen after initial photography began in 2020.

Reagan has done surprisingly well despite its lengthy production process and recently publicized social media limitations on its advertising. Facebook curiously claimed that it removed a film trailer from its platform because it “mentions politicians or is about sensitive issues that could influence public opinion, how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation.” Apparently, nobody told the leftist social media giant that Reagan, who died in 2004, has been dead for over 20 years and is not currently running for office.

Professional film critics, who skew overwhelmingly left, were also unkind to the film, with only 17 percent of 63 surveyed reviews registering a positive opinion, compared to 77 percent of the general public who, according to the CinemaScore marketing agency, would recommend the film to others. Reagan’s Labor Day weekend earnings exceeded expectations by about 50 percent, landing it in third place, behind two end-of-summer blockbusters released by major studios.

Despite Reagan’s relative box office success, it is hard to call the film an unqualified hit. Quaid, who has played presidents at least twice before, is a credible actor but neither looks nor sounds anything like Ronald Reagan, despite what appears to have been ample use of the latest cinematic technologies. The screenwriters’ invention of the Viktor Petrovich character is an intrusion that recalls Edmund Morris’s unfortunate biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), which also included fictional characters to advance the narrative, a device from which Morris’s scholarly reputation never fully recovered. The Cold War resonance of Voight’s croaking Russian accent, moreover, sounded less like a Bond villain and more like the cartoon character Boris Badenov from The Bullwinkle Show.  

The portrayal of Reagan’s marriage to Nancy (who is played by an unmemorable Penelope Ann Miller) is cloying and leaves out any hint of its widely witnessed tensions. His decision to pursue the presidency improbably arises from an impromptu backyard prayer session involving Pat Boone and a visiting pastor rather than his lifelong convictions and the raging ideological battles that beset the Republican Party in the 1970s. Opposition to Reagan’s presidency is reduced to Dan Lauria’s congenial portrayal of Democratic House majority leader Tip O’Neill and a brief montage of discordant leftist protests set to a disco soundtrack.

Following a strict narrative spanning more than 40 years of Reagan’s public life, the film unfolds almost as a montage of “greatest hits” familiar to anyone aware of American politics since World War II. This is particularly true of the 1980s Cold War episodes, in which the president’s resolve for a time overcame what was already a weak and overly cautious GOP establishment, personified in the film by Secretary of State George Shultz (Reagan’s vice president and successor George H. W. Bush is relegated to uttering just one line that answers to his pre-Gulf War reputation as a “wimp”). In one of the film’s few truly great scenes, Shultz provokes and then loses a shouting match over whether Reagan should use the forceful “tear down this wall” line in his Berlin Wall speech.

The film periodically intermixes childhood scenes featuring Reagan’s alcoholic father, strong mother, wise preacher, encounters with bullies, and other formative influences that may have influenced his adult decisions. Yet like the man himself, those decisions were of such great complexity that it is hard to accept the film’s storybook quality. In some ways, it even comes close to validating the left’s false caricature of Reagan as a simpleton, an actor of little depth and few ideas, which was very far from the case.

Reagan’s legacy remains disputed, and those disputes may play out in how conservatives view the film. The remnants of the establishment GOP will find little to justify their attempts to resurrect their selective vision of the “Reagan Revolution,” a myopic focus on tax and trade policies that unwisely ceded social and cultural matters to the radical left. Social and cultural conservatives, in turn, will find little very about Reagan’s approach to their issues, which, like the man himself, were complex, evolved over time, and faced significant practical limitations. More foreign policy-minded national conservatives will be pleased to see a popular corrective restoring Reagan’s role in winning the Cold War. The nonideological viewer, however, will see a bland “feel-good” film about an American president of yesteryear.