NEW YORK (OSV News) – Many have observed that one of the characteristic strengths of President Ronald Reagan’s political career was the fact that he focused on a few strongly held but straightforward beliefs and communicated them with great effectiveness. Thus his two terms each in the California governor’s mansion and the White House.
Such simplicity may be an asset on the campaign trail but it’s questionable at the Cineplex. So, although Christian faith is front and center in the screen biography “Reagan” (Showbiz Direct), the film’s noticeable lack of subtlety undermines its overall potential impact.
In adapting the 2006 book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism” by Paul Kengor, director Sean McNamara and screenwriter Howard Klausner provide a curious entree into their story. Namely, the reminiscences of retired KGB officer Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight).
Quizzed by a colleague about the reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, Petrovich recounts his decades-long effort to gain information about Reagan, even before the second-tier leading man became an anti-communist activist and, later, a politician. Accordingly, it’s through Petrovich’s memory that we witness Reagan’s rise from small-town lifeguard to commander-in-chief.
Along the way, Reagan enjoys the support of his devout mother, Nelle (Amanda Righetti), his famously doting but formidable second wife, Nancy (Penelope Ann Miller), and his more moderate-minded secretary of state, George Shultz (Xander Berkeley). Ranged against him are leftists in Hollywood, personified by union head Herbert Sorrel (Mark Kubr), and on campus.
As Petrovich tries to warn his superiors that Reagan poses a serious threat to their rule, we’re taken inside the Kremlin and it’s in these scenes that the profile’s black-and-white approach to history becomes most glaring. As presided over by Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev (Robert Davi), the Soviet politburo looks like a gathering of comic-book villains.
Without in any way minimizing the atrocious record of world communism, it can still be said that — in dramatic terms at least — this is sketchy stuff. Brezhnev, after all, would not have risen to the top of an admittedly vicious system had he been merely the heedless dunderhead portrayed here.
While Brezhnev’s eventual successor, Mikhail Gorbachev (Olek Krupa), comes off a little better, blacklisted tinseltown screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson) is depicted as a shifty provocateur. At a swank dinner, he’s heard uttering thinly veiled threats against democracy and capitalism. But he refuses to be drawn out when challenged by Reagan.
Surely the man who gave us the script of “Roman Holiday” would have been more eloquent — even in defense of wrongheaded ideas.
Ultimately, the equation underlying the film amounts to something like this: 1 Godfearing Reagan + 1 Margaret Thatcher (Lesley-Anne Down) + 1 JohnPaul II = 0 USSR. That’s not at all an inaccurate sum, but it may be an incomplete one.
With objectionable ingredients kept to a minimum, and a lesson about the value of honesty on offer via the climax of the Iran-Contra scandal, “Reagan” is suitable fare for a wide audience. But hippies and Mondale voters need not apply.
The film contains brief stylized violence, a couple of mild oaths and at least one crass expression. The OSV News classification is A-II — adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.