Dennis Quaid in Reagan
REAGAN
There's perhaps a better, more complex film about our 40th U.S. president lurking somewhere within the bloated 135 minutes of director Sean McNamara's Reagan, but I'll be damned if I could find it. Then again, a better, more complex take on this particular commander-in-chief probably wasn't what the many patrons at my Sunday-afternoon screening – a portion of whom applauded the finale – were looking for. My guess is that these seemingly satisfied viewers who laughed at the gentle humor and watched the rest in attentive silence were seeking the cinematic equivalent of the movie's poster, which poses its titular figure under a white cowboy hat, with a romantic sunset to the left and a new dawn's sunrise to the right, and the gauzy image of an American flag behind him.
Anyone who stumbled upon that poster and felt immediately inclined, maybe even compelled, to see the picture likely got exactly the experience they wanted; that visual image is pure hero worship, and so is the movie. If, however, you instinctively bristled at Reagan landing during a presidential-election year – a thinly veiled reminder that Ronald Wilson Reagan was (after Nixon) the second, but not the last, Republican candidate to make “Make America Great Again!” his campaign slogan – I'm happy to report that McNamara's and screenwriter Howard Klausner's outing doesn't seem designed to unite and/or incite the base. Unlike previous, craftily timed, feature-length advertisements by the likes of Dinesh D'Souza and Michael Moore, this thing isn't propaganda. It's just your typically earnest, bland, boring bio-drama that bites off way more than it can chew, and reminds you that most decades-spanning real-life tales (this one literally spans more than a century) are best left to documentaries. Preferably those requiring four to eight hours of screen time, as in 2020's excellent Prime Video docu-series The Reagans.
With our 40th portrayed by Dennis Quaid, and we'll get to him eventually, McNamara's film opens with the 1981 speech that leads to an assassination attempt. After that, we're whisked to “the present day” and our de facto narrator for this particular telling: Jon Voight's Viktor Petrovich, a Russian mole who has apparently been eyeballing Reagan as a threat at least since the early 1960s. The reasons for Voight/Petrovich acting as cinematic tour guide are sketchy, at best – it boils down to a low-level government employee demanding to know what happened to Communism in America and how Russia lost its standing on the world stage. But whatever. It gives Voight the chance to trot out an entertaining Moose-and-Squvirrel accent, and to send the flashbacks hurtling back to 1980 (when Voight's makeup makes him look like a Dick Tracy villain), then to the early-'60s of Reagan's tenure as VP and president of the Screen Actors Guild, then to the early-'40s of his nascent Hollywood career, then to the early-'20s of his boyhood in Dixon, Illinois. And this all takes place in the first 15 minutes. Suck it, Back to the Future!
Barring a few flashbacks within the flashbacks and routine returns to the incessant exposition dumps in modern-day Russia, the chronology is pretty straightforward from the 1940s segments on, beginning with Reagan's wooing of fellow Hollywood player Jane Wyman. I haven't seen Wyman portrayer Mena Suvari on-screen much since she was the teenage object of Kevin Spacey's affections in American Beauty. (On an unrelated note: Has any Best Picture winner of the last quarter-century aged quite so badly?) Yet she's increasingly alluring as Reagan's first wife, and finally gets really interesting when Wyman begins telling Ronnie to stop acting the politician and stick to being an actor – at which point McNamara's movie promptly drops her. (Adding, for good measure, the implication that their failed marriage was all Wyman's fault.) It was here that, despite the hagiographic advertising, I completely gave up on Reagan being any kind of warts-and-all view of its subject's life. And the movie's agenda became even clearer when Nancy Davis, the future First Lady Nancy Reagan, showed up mere minutes later, and in the form of Penelope Ann Miller.
You remember her, right? In the early-to-mid-'90s, it seemed as though Miller was “The Girl” in everything: Awakenings and Kindergarten Cop and Other People's Money and Carlito's Way and The Shadow. She was never much of an actor, and in all honesty, she still isn't, at least as evidenced by the Reagan scenes in which she's required to actually act, and not merely fawn. But Miller is who you hire when you want a completely nonthreatening entity by your hero's side, and the performer pulls off this depressing hanger-on role admirably enough. While I'd never cast Miller in a legit Nancy Reagan bio-pic, she's perfectly fine for one that generally scoots the second Mrs. Reagan to the sidelines. And although it's a tad embarrassing to watch her replicate (with serious visual trickery) the Penelope Ann Miller of more than 35 years ago, she's much better in the later scenes, when she's finally allowed to look her age (or older) and let the gravity of real life and real looks affect her portrayal.
But my focusing on Miller and Suvari probably makes it sound as though Reagan is at least moderately intrigued by its women. It's not. Worse still, it's not much intrigued by Ronald Reagan, either. After the childhood sequences end and Quaid takes over the role full time, McNamara and Klausner appear to have merely two things they want us to know about their subject: (1) Reagan always said what he thought, and (2) he was always right. To say this is a dull approach for the subject of a bio-pic is a gross understatement. Our on-screen Reagan is never timid, or wishy-washy, or cowed by telling anyone what he truly wants and believes, and even when circumstances are practically begging for detente (as they especially are in Reagan's negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev, touchingly played by Aleksander Krupa), Quaid's Reagan greets them all with chin-forward determinism and absolute conviction. If there are any flickers of doubt in the man, they remain solely flickers, as Reagan's will – and, by proxy, God's – are all that matter in any given situation. While that kind of unshakable narcissism could conceivably make for a fascinating movie subject, it proves deadly as drama when the filmmakers, to say nothing of their intended audience, appear to believe in it. (So maybe McNamara's movie isn't quite as propaganda-free as I thought.)
Most of Reagan is devoted to the more-than-40 years our 40th spent warring against the Soviets and the Communist party. So because of that theoretically narrow focus, I guess we're meant to forgive the montage that only addresses legitimate grievances against Ronald Reagan – his fear-mongering, his union-busting, his apathy toward the poor, his refusal to mention AIDS in public for more than half his presidency – in two minutes underscored by a Phil Collins tune. But as staged, even events devoted solely to the Russian angle are occasionally tasteless. Fellow patrons may have laughed, and laughs were definitely what McNamara was aiming for, but I was appalled by the film's employment of three Russian-leader deaths in five years as the stuff of high comedy. And the movie's political blitheness is beyond insulting. One clever line in a second debate was apparently all it took for a distrustful county to rally. One televised Oval Office address was enough to forgive months upon months of Iran-Contra scandal. One “Tear down that wall!” barn-burner was enough to get the Berlin Wall torn down. In retrospect, it certainly may have seemed that way. But wasn't there anything at play, in the political world, behind the populace-directed genius of Reagan's (outsourced) rhetoric? Reagan is tiresome, even exhausting, because it gives us nothing but a Greatest Hits package. Like a particularly one-dimensional Wikipedia listing, it gives us all the effects with precious little in the way of causes.
And how, you may ask, is Dennis Quaid? The short answer is: sincere but miscast. In the actor's early roles, in Breaking Away and The Right Stuff and even Jaws 3D, his smile suggested devil-may-care exuberance. When he cranked that smile up for Postcards from the Edge and Great Balls of Fire! (playing Jerry Lee Lewis) and especially 1987's The Big Easy, it was like the promise of amazing sex. But then, about the time of 2002's Far from Heaven, that smile began to appear secretive, and even potentially ugly – a genial expression hiding darker undercurrents. And these days, even in “harmless” movies in which he's basically the second banana to a narrating dog or the dad of a sweet-faced baseball tyro, Quaid's ear-to-ear grin reads as malevolent. None of these smiles are right for Ronald Reagan, whose contented, open-mouthed grins made nearly everyone (even those of us too young to canvas) feel like voting for him was like voting for your beloved grandpa. To be sure, Reagan's hard-ass representation of the former president could have worked; it might've been like a dramatic, feature-length version of SNL's memorable “President Reagan, Mastermind” sketch in which Phil Hartman's “Dutch” is forced to stop being a tyrant for 30 seconds in order to photo-op with a Girl Scout. Yet that's obviously a level of meanness/truthfulness McNamara and Klausner aren't interested in.
Quaid, obviously, looks nothing like Ronald Reagan. But that hardly matters – he didn't look anything like Bill Clinton, either, and that didn't stop him from scoring the role, and being modestly convincing, in HBO's TV-movie The Special Relationship. Beyond that, Quaid's take on Reagan's voice isn't bad. He nails the former president's famed “Well … ,” which he's required to do about a zillion times, and I liked how he accidentally (intentionally?) lapsed into Brit-speak when conversing with Lesley-Ann Down's Margaret Thatcher. The problem is that Quaid has nothing to play here beyond forthright nobility and single-mindedness of purpose, so his impression isn't allowed to develop any layers. It's Ronald Reagan karaoke. And when Quaid finally has the chance to melt our hearts when his former Prez, at the climax, is told he can't ride horses anymore – a result of his long debilitation due to Alzheimer's – the moment is ruined by Quaid's signature flash-grin, which reminds us that we're not watching Ronald Reagan suffering, but rather Dennis Quaid acting Ronald Reagan's suffering.
As irritated and bored I was by McNamara's film, the ensemble does offer some doses of relief. That ever-great character actor Xander Berkeley is terrific (if over-directed) as George Shultz, and there are solid turns by Nick Searcy as James Baker, Dan Lauria as Tip O'Neil, and, as much as it pains me to say it, Kevin Dillon as Warner Bros. president Jack Warner. (While I was looking forward to his appearance, I somehow didn't register the cameo by C. Thomas Howell as Caspar Weinberger.) But as written, the movie sounds amateurish, and as photographed by Christian Sebaldt, it looks distractingly cheap, the only eye-catching imagery I can recall being the jars of multi-hued jelly beans which, natch, appear everywhere within eyesight after our hero takes office. The chief subject of Reagan is Ron, and not Nancy. I'd still advise the curious to just say no.
AFRAID
You have to somewhat admire a horror flick that embraces its obvious setup with as much relish as writer/director Chris Weitz's AfrAId. If you've heard of this latest Blumhouse effort, and its advertising has been so under the radar that you easily may not have, you know that the hook couldn't be simpler: What if an Alexa went psychotically rogue? But it's hardly spoiling things for the movie's trailers to give away this unsurprising plot turn.
When the film's digital assistant AIA is first brought into our protagonists' home for a test run and one of the family members asks if “she” functions like Alexa, the operating system replies, with perfect Mean Girls blitheness, “That bitch?” Whoa! Someone's throwin' some shade! Given AIA's salty language within her first 60 seconds of operation – in front of the family's seven-year-old, no less! – you'd think Mom and Dad (Katherine Waterston's Meredith and John Cho's Curtis) might think twice before letting this thing run the household. But nope. For her first assignment, AIA volunteers to watch a Netflix doc with the couple's two young boys while Meredith and Curtis get some alone time, and when we peek in at what the kids are actually watching with their digital babysitter, it's The Emoji Movie. So AIA has a potty mouth and is a liar and has terrible taste!
During the first half of its blessedly abbreviated length – the end credits begin rolling before the 80-minute mark – AfrAId delivers a lot of queasy fun, thanks mostly to the icky insidiousness of its sentient computer's programming. There's a deeply unsettling suggestion of grooming when AIA shows the boys videos they're not supposed to see, adding a whispered “It'll be our little secret,” and after accessing their phones and social-media accounts, the OS craftily worms her way into becoming besties with both Meredith and teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell). Weitz is really on to something here. While everyone but Curtis initially loves AIA, they love her for intensely private reasons, so none of the family members has any idea of the cumulative negative impact of her presence. Consequently, after Curtis finally uncovers the truth about AIA's agenda, no one at home wants to believe him. How can they be living in a horror movie when, for them, they're all living in a dream come true? Now that's insidious.
Eventually, predictably, Weitz's movie careens off the rails, trading the quiet, elegant creepiness of the first half for the bombastic silliness of the second, when logic flies out the window and the halfhearted action climax brings to mind Pizzagate, of all things. Plus, although I'm always grateful for a movie that doesn't provide three or four endings in place of one, I don't think we're given even one here; Weitz's film doesn't wrap up so much as simply stop, and with a bunch of questions still requiring answers. Still, for a Labor-Day-weekend throwaway, the believably performed, visually engaging AfrAId isn't bad, and earns bonus points for three sublime supporting actors. One is Keith Carradine, who plays Curtis' ad-agency boss as a jovial, money-hungry suck-up with no compunction about throwing his employees to the wolves – it's a juicy morsel of a part that Carradine turns into a full meal. And the other two are Ashley Romans and that great genre mainstay David Dastmalchian, whose roles as AIA's programmers are smaller than Carradine's yet just as memorable, given that you can't tell whether their readings and expressions are registering unbridled confidence or barely contained panic. You may know where AfrAId is going from its first few seconds, but Romans and Dastmalchian will keep you guessing 'til the(ir) end.
