Reagan (8/10)

by Tony Medley

135 minutes

PG-13

The first hour of this movie is a prime example of horrible movie-making. It’s poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly directed, poorly staged, and poorly acted. It put me asleep four times. Fortunately, I was watching on a link so I could go back and ensure I saw the entire movie and didn’t miss any of the boredom.

The second 75 minutes, however, starting with his election as Governor of California, are excellent. Directed by Sean McNamara from a script by Howard Klausner, it would have been far better to make a concise, 90-minute movie about his career in politics. Maybe they could devote 10-15 minutes to his life before. Instead, it would have lost me had I been sitting in a movie theater. A perfect example is the new movie, Lee, in theaters the end of the month in which Producer/Star Kate Winslet tells the story of photographer Lee Miller by sticking to just the work she did in WWII, not her whole life.

The movie is worth seeing because it does a good job of capturing Reagan’s brilliance in winning the Cold War without firing a shot after he entered politics. In the first hour, though, he looks like someone doing a poor, cringeworthy Rich Little-like imitation of Reagan. Penelope Ann Miller plays Reagan’s wife, Nancy. Her Nancy isn’t the Nancy I remember.

Aided by outstanding cinematography (Christian Seybaldt), Dennis Quaid gives an award-quality performance in the titular role after they get into the guts of Reagan’s political career. He looks and talks like Reagan.

However, the way the story is told, by Victor Petrovich (Jon Voight, in an excellent performance), a fictitious KGB agent assigned to follow Reagan throughout his career (leading one to ask, really? Why?), is a dubious device, and tends to rob the movie of verisimilitude, adding to the dreariness of the first hour. Why tell a true story by using a fictional scenario? It’s nonsense.