As a rule, reviews of movies dealing with political figures generally tell the readers of the reviews more about the reviewer than about the subject of the movie. So it is with the reviews of the current film, “Reagan.”
The website Rotten Tomatoes has shown that only around 20 percent of the reviews of “Reagan” by professional movie reviewers have been positive. That contrasts markedly with the 98 percent positive audience score. Neither of those scores should be surprising. Since our cultural commentators predominantly lean left, they would tend to bristle at the movie’s unapologetically appreciative salute to our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. And since American moviegoers are generally more interested in seeing biopics about people that they like than those they dislike, there is an inevitable self-selection process that skews the favorable audience rating higher.
The common denominator of the negative reviews is an ideological antipathy toward Ronald Reagan’s worldview, values, and policies. Thus, when the movie faithfully narrates the story of Reagan’s presidency, they grumble because the movie doesn’t represent their own particular slant on historical events. Where fans of Reagan enjoy the movie’s narration of his accomplishments, negative reviewers belittle, ignore, or just don’t understand those accomplishments. They were looking for a movie that reinforced their own negative biases, and when the movie didn’t give them what they wanted, they panned it.
The three most common themes running through the negative reviews are that (1) the “communist threat” (both foreign and domestic) wasn’t as big a deal as the movie makes it, and that the movie gives Reagan too much credit for stopping the advance of communism; (2) Reagan’s economic policies were no good; and (3) because of the disdain for Reagan’s Christian-informed worldview, the “good versus evil” moral stance to which Reagan adhered in his defense of freedom and steadfast commitment to defeating communist tyranny is unacceptably simplistic.
The negative reviewers’ comments about communism are suggestive, if not telling. One particularly acidulous reviewer wrote, “With every ham-fisted scene of myth-mired heroism [the movie] seek[s] veneration for the Man Who Ended Communism: the guy who’d had the reds in his sights for decades; the sincere smile that hid a fierce warrior; the Christian whose perfect long game—star to Screen Actors Guild head to FBI informant to governor to world leader making folksy quips—inevitably shattered the godless Soviet Union.”
There is a lot of truth in that withering sentence. Yes, Reagan understood the nature of communism from his youth through to the end of his long life. Yes, he was a Christian who recognized the evil of godless communism. Yes, his policies as president led to the crackup of the murderous, evil Soviet Union. Why mock him for any of that?
It is historically undeniable, however, that Reagan’s clarity, resolve, and leadership were indispensable to those welcome developments. There was no other politician in that era who could have taken Reagan’s place.
That same review, by the way, also asserted that communists really hadn’t “gained a foothold in Hollywood” as the movie showed. That is simply false. Communists had a foothold in Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s, and were attempting to gain a stranglehold over the Screen Actors Guild when Reagan, as president of the guild, thwarted them.
A smaller number of reviewers sniped at Reagan’s economic record. In their mythology, Reaganomics was the crackpot theory of “trickle-down economics” by which the rich got richer and the poor settled for crumbs. In fact, Reaganomics launched a powerful economic boom that lasted for the rest of the 20th century, greatly improving standards of living for all Americans, including the non-rich.
To close, I’ll offer a comment on the reviewers who mock the fact that the Christian Ronald Reagan prevailed in his faceoff against the “godless Soviet Union.” There seems to be an anti-Christian animus there. Sadly, many Americans seem to believe that a reasonable approach is to accommodate communism, to refuse to judge a political philosophy whose basis, according to Lenin himself, is hatred, and which has resulted in the death of more than 100 million innocent lives. Thank God for the moral clarity of Ronald Reagan—a clarity derived from his Christian faith—who understood the difference between good and evil, and who stood unwaveringly on the side of good.
“Reagan,” the movie, tells the true story. If truth triggers discomfort among some reviewers, that’s their problem. Don’t let it stop you from seeing the movie.
