Reagan in Motion – Presidents in Films 1.
A series in which I will be unreasonably grumpy about pop-cultural products depicting Presidents of the United States.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States: his name is synonymous with an entire decade, the 1980s, an actor-turned-politician who’s legacy – for better or worse – is still palpable not just in America but around the world. An American President who has not one but two statues in Budapest for reasons difficult to parse. It is somewhat odd that his successor George H W Bush, who actually visited Budapest rather memorably in 1989 only just got his statue in 2020, very near one of Reagan’s statues. The two of them are now surrounding the monument to the Soviet liberation of Hungary at Szabadság (‘Liberty’) square, which opens up all sorts of avenues for jokes and metaphors.
Think what you want about ol’ Ronnie, he certainly made an impression on the world and because of that – and the seemingly perpetual nostalgia towards the 1980s – there are plenty of depictions of him in popular culture. It’s easy to forget though that the Ronald Reagan of the early years of his presidency is not the same as the end of his second term: he came into office on an aggressively anti-Communist platform, scaring the living daylights out of Brezhnev who feared the end of Détente. Or maybe he didn’t, for the last few years of his life what really went on in the head of ol’ Leonid Ilyich is a kind of a mystery, he wasn’t a well man.
In sharp contrast, the perception of Reagan towards the end of his term became somewhat different: we are seeing an old man somewhat confused, more grandfatherly in appearance and mannerisms. And while the Iran-Contra Affair on its own should have warranted an impeachment, no one seriously thought that this old man – who was the same age as John F. Kennedy would have been if he wasn’t killed – was some sort of criminal mastermind.
So the mystery of Ronald Reagan – a Democrat turned Republican, an actor turned politician, a fervent war-hawk turned docile granddad. Whatever the truth was, he is now a blank canvas we can project anything we think of his age – and some of it is terrifyingly wrong. This list is of course far from being complete, and we all will find out later this year if the Dennis Quaid-lead ‘Reagan’ is any good – I’ll reserve judgement until the movie is out.
Let’s start going through some of the Reagan depiction from good to bad – this is not a definitive list, so feel free to add your picks in the comments.
1. ‘Fargo’, Season 2 – Bruce Campbell
And of course the best Ronald Reagan depiction (so far) belongs to the one and only Bruce Campbell. For my money no one has come closer to give us the most authentic Reagan-experience than him in anthology series Fargo’s second season, where he is campaigning in Minnesota. We get to see him do what he did best, the delivery of a campaign speech. He was an excellent retail politician, and while he might not be best remembered for his acting abilities, up close and in person when he had to play the character of Ronald Reagan – the folksy charm, how he subverted expectations of not behaving or speaking like anyone from Hollywood. Bruce Campbell not only nails the tenor and the pace of Reagan the performer, he nails him when it comes to a little intimate scene in the bathroom with Patrick Wilson, seeking guidance for his troubles. Reagan is seen being completely out of his depth, leaning on the perceived wisdom of of empty platitudes and his inability to seriously engage and connect with a stranger has never been more apparent than here.
We all love Bruce Campbell for various reasons, but if anything this performance proves that he is a proper actor, and not just a pop-culture reference.
2. ‘The Reagans’ – James Brolin
First of all, hats off to the make-up department, they did a tremendous job. It would be a back-handed compliment to say the mask is doing the heavy lifting, but it’s fair to say that the script is way too excited to be a coherent film – albeit it would be interesting to see what the originally envisioned two-part miniseries would have looked like. Clearly the makers of ‘The Reagans’ have strong views about the former president, but unlike other, tonally similar movies this one fails to be more than a collection of indictment against Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Even if you agree with it politically, you have to admit, it’s not a very good movie. James Brolin is not a bad Reagan, although you can see that he is definitely a better actor than Reagan ever was, and that sometimes conveys the opposite of the desired effect. (Interesting that James Brolin played Reagan and his son played George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s ‘W’, but we will get to that one too, don’t worry)
3. ‘The Day Reagan Was Shot’ - Richard Crenna
Richard Crenna is basically playing a side character to the dramatisation of one of the times the United States was closest to a coup. (I’m going to quietly ignore January 6th for the time being) Richard Dreyfuss have never been closer to be a moustache-twirling villain, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a performance he will almost verbatim repeat in ‘W’ as Dick Cheney, but that’s not our subject for today. Richard Crenna is playing Richard Crenna, there’s not a whole lot I can say about the performance since he spends most of the running time absent – hence the crisis. I rate it higher because his casting makes it almost look like a sequence out of ‘Wrongfully Accused’, and the rest of the film is also unintentionally farcical. Or at least I think it should have been more *overtly* funny to make it work properly, but it tries its best to be earnest about that day in 1981.
4. ‘The Butler’ – Alan Rickman.
Oh Alan. It’s really not your fault. Alan Rickman can’t help but to follow the screenplay and give a genuine sense of trepidation and a quiet but palpable weight to Reagan, with a level of coherence and gravitas that frankly the original never possessed. The film even tries to be even-handed and almost apologetic to Reagan, when this performance could have used a lot more scenery-chewing, instead of the earnest and tender depiction we got. I’m going to chalk this up as one of the least important aspect of ‘The Butler’, an otherwise beautiful film.
5. ‘For All Mankind’ – Jeff Bergman
I have already expressed my frustration with Apple TV’s flagship series, and in the grand scheme of things this ought to be one of the smaller offence. But honestly the notion that Ronald Reagan would personally turn up on a video call with anyone at NASA, even the head of NASA is just simply nonsense: Reagan was nicknamed “The Great Delegator” for a reason. In our timeline William Graham was the administrator of NASA and he was basically able to enjoy it as his own personal domain. I’m going to stay away from conspiracy theories how the need to launch Atlantis in time for the State of the Union address played any part in the tragedy, but I would like to merely point out that Reagan was a “big picture guy”, not so much a micro manager with all the advantages and drawbacks of that. It certainly gave him plausible deniability when things wend tits up. Franklin D Roosevelt had a similar approach in putting people in charge of competing ideas to see which works out and when something did, he rolled with that. Keeping options open is a good thing, but Reagan was really hands off with even those things where he shouldn’t have, he gave Carte Blanche to people he shouldn’t have. And while many of the former Nixon thugs became better at being henchmen, not to the degree to avoid being caught again. It’s a small oversight in the grand scheme of things, and what would be more 80s than to have a bit of Reagan somewhere in the soup – but the way it plays out is purely fantasy-Reagan.
6. ‘Killing Reagan’ - Tim Matheson
In any universe this should be occupying the worst place. This movie is an adaptation of a Bill O’Reilly book – elder millennials who followed Jon Stewart back in the day might remember him – which isn’t very good to begin with, if it wasn’t for the author’s close association with Fox News, few people would have ever bought it at an airport book store during a long layover. I love Tim Matheson, I think he’s a good actor and have some really good performances in his back catalogue. But in this case he is not being served by the material he is given and he’s also struggling with the voice – which is where most of the performance lies with any depiction of a real life character. Everyone has to make a choice when it comes to playing someone who existed, and who has been filmed and recorded extensively in real life. How closely you want to imitate him, without sounding like a caricature impression? Do you want to even attempt to do the voice? James Cromwell famously struggled with playing George H. W. Bush in ‘W’ until Oliver Stone told him to jettison all artifice and concentrate on the character – he’s playing a father. And he did, and he does *not* sound like George Bush Sr. Do I mind it? Not a bit. I have other problems with that film but we will get there. Tim Matheson has put himself in the worst possible place: at times he does a quite passable Reagan impression but he loses it frequently and his performance because of that feels inconsistent. Did I mentioned that it’s also a terrible movie?
7. ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ – Jeff Bergman
This is really the reason why this piece exists. So back in 2020 we all had some alone time, didn’t we? And I was sort of following along the saga that is ‘Call of Duty’. I have to confess, I enjoyed the first ‘Black Ops’, despite it suffering from the same disease as any ‘Call of Duty’ since ‘Modern Warfare 2’. (The ‘Call of Duty 4’ sequel not the recent one. God I wish they came up with a more consistent naming scheme for these): the player is no longer playing a character in a video game, one member of a special operations team, the player is an amalgam of every action movie hero from the 1980s onwards. But I kind of enjoyed ‘The Manchurian Candidate’-inspired spy-thriller-military-action-FPS which despite the sometimes nonsensical scenery and anachronistic assets, felt like a bit of pulpy fun which makes Robert McNamara a Non-Playable Character for no particular reason other than they can. And it has a nice voice cast as well. Looking at it then and even now creating an entire storyline on the back of this one game alone sounds stupid. But the studio decided it wasn’t stupid so they went ahead and made a series of decreasingly intelligible games building on this story alone. And in 2020 of course we arrived to the 1980s because of course we have to do an 80s throwback, everyone did it. And what could be more 1980s than to re-animate not just Ronald Wilson Reagan in pristine ultra high definition, but some of his cabinet as well. I don’t know how many of you were impressed with the highly detailed character animation of Alexander Haig, because sure as hell the kids were crying out for that. This Ronald Reagan is basically the Disney animatronic statue: gives you platitudes because you remember some of those words, while he confidently asserts that he is aware of the main characters’ biography – another funny joke if it wasn’t delivered in this po-faced very self-serious “WE ARE REALLY IN THE EIGHTIES, MAN” way that I hate, I hated it in ‘Atomic Blonde’ too – we will get to there, we all will get to there. What I miss from a Call of Duty game is a sense of fun. *Something* beyond the earnestness of a plot that comes straight out of a Qanon thread on 8chan. At least the first ‘Call of Duty’ had this mixture of reverence for the heroism of World War Two, that was intertwined with the realities of war – the mud, the relentless noise of the fight, the awfulness, the often forgotten bad aspects. Modern ‘Call of Duty’ games have nothing beyond “look at cool set-piece” and mountain dew soaked teenage boy angst, which is quite boring at this stage. And watching the reveal trailer of the sequel featuring even *more* real life characters from our near-past guarantees that I will be grumpy about that one too.
So here’s a list of my petty grievances, if you agree or disagree or if you just want to shout at me, you will find the comment section below. Next week I will be back with more BUSES.