Oklahoma-produced ‘Reagan’ a whitewashed, incoherent mess


Regardless of your politics or your opinions of the man, the truth is that the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan are rife with dramatic potential and narrative promise.

The young life of Reagan the actor was filled with secret scandal and Hollywood gamesmanship, and his administration as the 40th President of the United States is bursting to this day with controversy, contentiousness, and conflicting accounts, even for his most ardent supporters.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the new $25 million dollar “Reagan,” the bewilderingly bloated biopic shot almost entirely in Oklahoma and reportedly financed heavily through our state’s film incentive program and tax rebate.

To believe the film, Reagan was always right, always pure, above reproach in every moment and decision of his life, and potentially anointed by divine forces themselves to “save” America as the nation’s greatest hero.

I’d love to review the film completely and totally separated from politics, because the movie itself is an incoherent mess entirely on its own, no overtly whitewashed or rewritten history is needed.

Director Sean McNamara leans persistently on cheap, obvious green screens and small indoor sets, making the whole film feel like a straight-to-DVD action movie from 2008. Even the fire in a fireplace is added with cartoonishly bad computer graphics. 

Writer Howard Klausner’s script lopes from scene to scene without regard for structure or narrative weight. Each scene is maybe twenty to thirty seconds long, just enough to show you a scenario and then move on, never allowing for impact or relevance to sink in for even a moment.

Of course, you don’t need any scene to land emotionally or conceptually. Every character just speaks in convenient exposition throughout, loudly telling the audience exactly how to feel about any given situation, about Reagan’s unshakable and clear stature as the greatest American hero, and most importantly, about the unmitigated evil of his enemies.

Why are they evil? “Because they’re communists.” Why is communism evil exactly? “Because communism is the enemy of freedom.” Can you elaborate on that? “No. Only a communist would ask for any deeper explanation.”

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Dennis Quaid in Reagan portrays Pres Ronald Reagan’s historic “Tear down this wall” speech.

The biggest question, though, is why Klausner saw fit to frame the entire story as some kind of political thriller through the continuous narration of a wholly fictional ex-KGB operative (played by notable kook Jon Voight) as he recounts Reagan’s life to a non-descript future evil Russian leader.

See, the idea is that they’d been keeping a close, worried eye on Reagan for his entire public life because, even way back when he was starring in forgotten B-movies in the 40s, they knew that he had the divine magic necessary to bring down the Soviet “evil empire.”

Why would the Russian government be scared of a random Hollywood twenty-something decades before he even considered entering politics? No deeper explanation is given.

In fact, there’s no deeper explanation of anything here.

This film is made exclusively and explicitly for people who already know and love Ronald Reagan and who already know and remember every geo-political development of his career. It must be that it wastes exactly no time ever expounding on what exactly the stakes or sources of any of those developments are.

Again, entirely removed from politics or personal opinion, it’s just weak writing.

When Reagan, as Governor of California, heroically orders that the National Guard be sent in to quell student protests, the circumstances surrounding what the students were protesting and why is never explained. 

When Soviet jets shoot down a civilian airliner with little warning and little reason, we’re given no explanation of where the plane came from or what the aftermath was.

When Soviet President Gorbachev name-drops the US’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative program, we’re never given any explanation of what that is or why it’s so important that Reagan refuse his requests to shut it down.

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Dennis Quaid, Darryl Cox, and Mark Moses in Reagan 2024

Again, this is all because the singular target audience for the film is people who have already devoured every Reagan biography, documentary, and right-wing news network remembrance. 

The intended viewer already knows every beat of this story, so the whole 140-minute slog feels like a greatest hits, shifting from scene to scene only to set up recreations of Reagan’s most famous speeches.

Which of course means the entire affair rests squarely on the actor playing Reagan and the obvious requirement that he disappear fully into the part to suspend all disbelief and whisk the viewer’s mind straight back to the real man.

And Dennis Quaid just doesn’t.

I’m not going to trash Quaid’s whole performance. He’s mostly fine for what the nonsensical, anti-dramatic script gives him. 

It’s difficult to convey any real depth or emotional range when the character you’re playing is written to be an unimpeachable paragon of all that is always good.

So that means he’s mostly left just doing a half-baked impression of the real Reagan, always grinning out of one side of his mouth and always speaking in an honestly odd, high-pitched, distractingly unconvincing impersonation of his famously coarse, breathy voice.

Admittedly, there are a select few shots where Quaid does look remarkably like the real Reagan, always from the back or far side and always strategically lit.

It raises the question of why McNamara didn’t utilize makeup or prosthetics to aid in Quaid’s transformation. Presumably, it’s because the entire makeup budget was blown on the horrifying mass of prosthetics used to turn actor Robert Davi into Brezhnev and on the cheap, waxy attempt at de-aging so that the 70-year-old Quaid can play Reagan starting in his late 20s.

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Dennis Quaid is honored by Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt after Oklahoma taxpayers incentivized the filming of “Reagan” in Oklahoma. (photo by Oklahoma Film and Music Office)

So yes, the filmmaking is bad, boring, and particularly in the case of the whole “fictional KGB agent” framing device, head-scratching and strange.

But while I’d love to review the entire film separated from politics, I honestly don’t feel that I can, mainly because McNamara saw fit to include a jarringly out-of-place montage of the mid-80s cultural opposition to Reagan by the end of his first term.

Setting the sequence to the classic “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, the screen flashes through all of the cultural “obstacles” that Reagan had to overcome to eventually secure a second term. These fleeting glimpses feel like they’re being framed as Reagan’s societal enemies, or at least as unreasonable impediments to the great, God-given work that America’s hero is doing.

And that’s especially the feeling you’re left with, as once the sequence is over, not one of the oppositional issues raised is ever so much as hinted at again.

Among these are young protesters, punk rockers, lots of Black people simply dancing, and Black activists, including one holding a sign reading: “The fake War on Drugs is really the new Jim Crow.”

Is that ever elaborated upon or addressed in any way to refute that statement? Nope.

You’re just left feeling as though the movie is framing that argument and others like it as adversarial and unnecessary and even whiny.

And then, most egregiously and infuriatingly, there are flashes of LGBTQ+ demonstrations and AIDS marches and signs reading “Silence = Death” calling out Reagan’s infamous insistence on total silence and disregard during the catastrophically deadly AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

Then the words on the screen plain as day, pulled from old video of the time: “RONALD REAGAN PRESIDED OVER 89,343 DEATHS TO AIDS AND DID NOTHING.”

Again, there is no elaboration, no refutation, no defense whatsoever from the filmmakers for their hero, and not one faint inclination that this was – and continues to be – a serious issue.

In that moment, it feels as if the filmmakers are framing the nearly 100,000 American lives lost to AIDS under Reagan’s watch as something akin to political enemies, little more than a collective roadblock that he had to plow through on his way to re-election.

It felt dehumanizing and disgusting and instantly changed the experience from that of a comically bad, unsurprisingly ridiculous B-movie to that of an openly far-right, hateful piece of hero-worship propaganda.

It’s all hand-waved away by Voight’s character with a simple “of course, not everyone loved Reagan.”

The same can be said for this film.

“Reagan” is in theaters everywhere now.


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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.