(Sept. 10) If you have any relatives under, say, 45 years old, I hereby pronounce it your civic duty, by any nonviolent means, to take them to see the movie Reagan.
As entertainment, the movie is not great but still definitely good. As history, Reagan is likewise solid. As an expositor of the right sort of public character, it is very good indeed. As a tribute to one of the greatest Americans of this or any lifetime, it does a more than admirable job, even if it lacks nuance and tends toward hagiography.
And in toto, the act of watching it is 141 minutes well spent. For those old enough to have been adults in the era of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the film is a fine reminder of the remarkable victories for freedom in the 1980s. For those not old enough, it can teach salutary lessons that today’s pathetic educational system usually distort and mangle, often with malice aforethought.
Dennis Quaid plays the 40th U.S. president with heart and admirable effort, even if he can’t capture the resonant timbre of Reagan’s unique voice. The set decorators, costume folks, and other visual-detail people do a masterful job recreating exact replicas of real scenes, captured on still or live film, from Reagan’s life, and the dialogue from many of those scenes is word for word as history recorded it.
The movie’s Reagan, like the real one as described by so very many of those who knew him, is a singularly resilient, willful, and sincere man of goodwill and of profound insights about the nature of freedom and of ideologies that threaten it. More important, he was one of those figures who changed history, for the better, in ways not a single other living soul would have done. What the movie Reagan teaches is that history is not just a result of anonymous, impersonal, inevitable “forces,” but instead changes through the willpower and choices of individuals…. [The full column is at this link.]
