Your TV critic reports on The Reagans

So I was all set to go to bed last night, when I started flipping channels, and I stumbled across “The Reagans,” the miniseries that was planned to air on CBS but was put on its sister network Showtime in response to activist pressure. Curious, I watched it. Critical reviews have been mixed. The New York Times says that the movie “turned out to be milder and more balanced than both its critics and its supporters had suggested.” The Salt Lake Tribune says it “truly is offensive, grotesque, unfair and ultimately trivial.” The Los Angeles Times has the most trenchant observation:

The political fuss and bother that nudged this film from network sweeps to Sunday night pay TV is in some ways more engaging than the film itself, at least to anyone acquainted with the real-time Reagan saga.

My own take: 1) Is the film a biased look at Reagan? Hell, yes. Any movie on Reagan’s presidency that devotes ten minutes to the Bitburg screw-up and a half-hour to the Iran-Contra affair but passes over the Challenger speech and deals with the waning of the Cold War with a 20 second scene is dealing from a stacked deck [What about the line about AIDS that was the source of much of the controversy?–ed. Ironically, that’s not in the final version — indeed, the final version of that scene is one of the more effective critiques of Reagan’s policies in the movie, as it has Reagan remaining silent in responce to Nancy’s entreaties, a deft symbol of Reagan’s AIDS policy (though see Andrew Sullivan for a dissent on this point)]. 2) Of course, even-handedness is an imperfect standard to judge biopics — by that score, you’d probably have to ding every Kennedy movie ever made for being too hagiographic or too critical. Films can be both partisan and good drama (think Reds). The question is, does the move grip you? The answer for this one is no. The Reagans is just shapeless. In part, this may be because it was based on Carl Sferazza Anthony’s First Ladies, Volume II, which Amazon describes as containing “minibiographies” of the relevant women. That ain’t a strong foundation for a three-hour movie. Watching it, I was never certain if the focus was Reagan’s political career, the relationship between Ron and Nancy, the entire Reagan family, or what. There was no narrative structure, no theme, no pacing. It boils down to a biased highlights clip. Of course, it was originally intended as a miniseries, and I haven’t seen a good one since Shogun. I do know this — if I were Patti Davis, I’d put a pox on the filmmakers. I haven’t seen such an unflattering, malignant portrayal of a presidential offspring since… well, I never saw it, but I bet the JFK Jr. biopic wasn’t particularly nice to John John. By far, she gets the worst treatment in this biopic. So, in closing, I’ll turn over the microphone to Davis herself, who had this to say in Time last month about the brouhaha:

They [producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron] have exhibited astounding carelessness and cruelty in their depiction of my father and my entire family. They never consulted any family member, nor did they speak to anyone who has known us throughout the years. In the New York Times on October 21st, one of the writers admitted that the line about AIDS victims was completely fabricated. In that same article, Jim Rutenberg reported that the producers claimed no major event was depicted without two confirming sources…. Reading the script actually made me feel better in some ways. It is, quite simply, idiotic. Everyone is a caricature, manufactured and inauthentic. My father is depicted as some demented evangelist, going on about Armageddon every chance he gets. My mother is cast as a female Attila the Hun, and I and my siblings are unrecognizable to me…. But the idiocy of the script can’t dilute the cruelty behind it. To deliberately and calculatingly depict public people as shallow, intolerant, cold and inept, with no truths or facts to back up the portrayals, is nothing short of malevolent…. My father would probably say, “This too shall pass.” And it will. We will continue to come to his bedside, knowing that death waits in the doorway and will one day reach for him. We will continue to cherish the fact that we walked away from our old battlegrounds and discovered how much better peace feels. We will look at each other through the clear glass of the present, not the mud-spatter of the past. What a pity the producers missed out on that part of the story.