Movies and TV Shows

I'm not really looking forward to the inevitably Obama hagiography, but releasing a movie like that right now would at least be timely. Reaganism might still rule our world, but Reagan - as a personality - hasn't been relevant in decades.

Left out of this scene is Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” remark, no doubt to avoid drawing parallels between its protagonist and Donald Trump, and it’s the first of innumerable instances in which McNamara and screenwriter Howard Klausner warp history for one-note lionization.

Which is a shame, because Trump really is the modern incarnation of The Gipper. He cribbed from Ronnie's playbook extensively and won with similar constituencies in a comparable upset campaign. Where Trump really failed was in his lack of an Evil Empire motivate the country against. Instead, he got a killer virus, which his own brand of cynical bumbling fascism was ill-disposed to confront. If Reagan had been held to Trump-esque standards for the AIDS epidemic, I wonder if he'd have suffered the same fate to Mondale in 1984. But AIDS was a disease for minorities, rather than rich old white men. So Reagan got to be the hero standing at the end of Cold War history, rather than the plague bringer that decimated the domestic economy.

Nonsensicality abounds, never more so than in Petrovich’s explanation for Reagan’s success: “People will not give their lives for power or a state or even ideology. People give their lives for one another, for the freedom to live those lives as they choose, and for God. We took that away. The Crusader gave it back to them.”

A bit of a shock to hear this, given the steady slide church attendance takes with the Gen X, Millennial, and Zoomer cohorts.

Considering its ceaseless hero worship, it’s unsurprising that Reagan concludes with an Alzheimer’s-afflicted Reagan riding off into the sunset. Yet for all the effort it expends trying to sell the late president as the embodiment of American virtue, McNamara’s film is so ungainly and transparent that it plays like embarrassing propaganda.

I can't think of a more perfect ending to a movie about one of America's premiere propagandists. But it feels like a message totally out of time with the modern audience. A "Hopey Changey" conservative throwback to a period of political optimism and a utopian vision of a single all-encompassing (fascist) movement that could sweep the nation.

If the movie falls to deliver, perhaps that's less the fault of the producer and the director than the man they sought to embody in their work.