There is a reason that die-hard American conservatives view so many books, movies, TV shows, music, theater, and other creative arts as ideologically toxic, as tools to “indoctrinate” people with “woke” values ​​or to “nurture” children to adopt an LGBTQ+ identity and become sexually permissive. That’s because they find little value in a piece of entertainment beyond reinforcing a political agenda and preferred cultural norms. For many on the far-right, Hollywood as a liberal place means that it absolutely produces content to liberalize the masses.

So the right is left with no choice but to develop counter-programs – which console them with the unequivocal assurance that they are right and the good guys. Some of these efforts aim to break with the mainstream; just think of Angel Studios, the Utah-based streaming service and production company that focuses on religious material and had a huge success with the drama about child trafficking. Sound of freedomAlternatively, you can round up a lot of washed-up talent, including various actors who claim they are victims of discrimination in Hollywood because of their right-wing views, to create a confused bore like Reaganwith Trump supporter Dennis Quaid in the role of the Gipper.

Reagan presents the comically simplistic view that President Ronald Reagan was solely responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and you can’t enjoy the film unless you already believe that. Even that may not be enough, because instead of focusing on a specific period of Reagan’s life – most of which could have made a compelling story – the film stumbles through seven decades in the course of a boring two-and-a-half hour running time. Historians can and certainly should address the numerous inaccuracies of Reaganif only for the sake of completeness (his long-standing opposition to civil rights legislation is not mentioned, for example), but it would be foolish to hope that these criticisms mean anything to the audience who came to see senseless hero worship, and got plenty of it.

It might therefore be more instructive to examine how director Sean McNamara fails to combine genuine drama with the propaganda framework. The inability to make art out of Ronald Reagan speaks not to his worthlessness as a subject, but to his lack of imagination. (The writer JG Ballard had no such problems.) In fact, Reagan I can’t even trace the broad outlines of your typical biopic because it refuses to allow any kind of complicating flaws in its protagonist, and the geopolitical standoff that serves as the main conflict is too big and abstract for the frame. Instead, you get years of Reagan’s pre-presidency grumbling about communism to anyone who will listen, and these people are impressed by it for some reason.

The film is also condescending to its own acolytes. With a lot to do, we’re treated to new characters who appear and disappear as if through a revolving door, contributing nothing to the narrative in their brief minutes of screen time. Since there are no scenes where we learn who they are and why they’re important, they’re introduced with name captions. But why should we care if this guy is Caspar Weinberger or that other guy is William P. Clark? The filmmakers certainly don’t care; we skim Wikipedia. They have so little faith in the audience’s ability to follow context clues that they unnecessarily caption even familiar scenes: A shot of the Golden Gate Bridge is labeled “San Francisco, CA,” while a cut to Big Ben towering over the Thames is captioned with a “London, UK” scrolling text. Never have I seen the cinematic equivalent of a Ben Garrison cartoon. Too bad they didn’t slap “Washington, DC” over the White House.

Questions of craftsmanship were probably seen as a mere distraction from the message of the Reagan. The awful wigs and makeup suggest that no queer people were allowed on set, and as a younger Reagan, Quaid practically looks Facetuned. The attempt to make Jon Voight, who plays an aged, fictional ex-KGB spy, periodically look younger is doomed from the start, as is the decision to portray the president’s life as a tale of civilization’s struggle spun through his abysmal Russian accent. (As a related side note: Quaid never quite finds a proper pronunciation for “Gorbachev”). The film is also simply Look awful, with blurry depth of field and edges of murky light that may be intended to evoke Reagan’s saintliness, but often give the impression that the actors have been digitally inserted into a room.

It is one thing to publish a hack image – in this sense, Reagan is a fitting tribute – and another that imbues it with such smugness that it has no sense of humor or irony. The two or three jokes were received with a forced chuckle by the same number of theatergoers, while unintentionally funny lines, like Reagan’s statement to Nancy early in their relationship that “nothing compares to being with a horse,” pass us by without us even looking twice. We hear Reagan quoting C.S. Lewis’s quote in his 1983 speech calling the USSR an “evil empire” Instructions for a sub-deviland notes that the greatest evil is no longer perpetrated in criminal dens but in “clear, carpeted, heated and well-lit offices, by quiet men in white collars with trimmed fingernails and clean-shaven cheeks who don’t have to raise their voices” – as if we didn’t mind him escalating the war on drugs and ignoring the AIDS crisis from the Oval Office while clean-shaven. Elsewhere, Reagan solemnly intones, “Family is important.” The man, an emotionally distant and absent father, did not recognize his own son after giving a speech at the young man’s high school graduation. Enter Reagan So recognition for this detail: the children disappear by 1969.

The mythology is offensive enough without Creed frontman Scott Stapp making an awkward cameo as Frank Sinatra or Kevin Sorbo as the minister who baptizes young Ronnie. Still, the whitewashing of Reagan’s communist-baiting remains the film’s defining sin, and a testament to how any sense of portraiture is swamped by a petty desire to win a one-sided debate. You see it everywhere, from the portrayal of communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as an effeminate gay antagonist to cowboy Reagan (there is no serious speculation that Trumbo, who was long married to Cleo Fincher and had three children with her, was not straight), to the automatic assumption that funding the Contras in Nicaragua was justified, to the maudlin idea of ​​Voight’s KGB character slowly realizing that Reagan is an anointed crusader who will bring world peace.

Well… why not? The word “communist” means nothing different to the MAGA right in 2024 than it did to Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in 1954: the ability to scare people with a fake crisis and thereby control them. Ultimately Reagan is a greater insult to the 40th President of the United States than anything I could say about him, since it dispenses with the human being to create a hologram of his likeness that is faker than the Strategic Defense Initiative. At their best, biographies wrestle with the contradictions of figures known for their influence and power. Reagan it’s just about having both.