2024-09-12 23:11:34
Film critics do not always agree with the audience. But rarely is there such a deep difference between their views as in the case of the new feature film about Ronald Reagan. The American president, whose government between 1981 and 1989 contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, is played by 70-year-old Dennis Quaid.
As the AFP agency writes, the commendably sounding biographical film began screening in cinemas in the US last week, i.e. just a few months before the presidential elections. While the average critic score on Rottentomatoes.com is around 20 percent, the audience rating is as high as 98 percent.
Professional critics criticize the film for being clumsy and too one-sided. For example, Rolling Stone magazine headlined its review “Reagan Movie Is Everything the Right Doesn’t Understand About Art.” Fans, on the other hand, accuse the critics of being elitist and, because of their Democratic Party sympathies, unable to recognize the qualities of an uplifting and patriotic portrait of a Republican politician.
“The political division of society definitely distorts it,” admits the film’s director, Sean McNamara. When he read the reviews, he got the impression that in some places more criticism was aimed at Reagan himself than at his film.
But the distributor has already started working on it. One of the latest press releases promotes the work as “the film that has caused the biggest split between critics and the public in modern Hollywood history”. Presenter Megyn Kelly wrote on the X social network that “left-wing critics have tried to run a movie into the ground again, but the American people didn’t listen.” And the conservative actor Kevin Sorbo, who acts in the film, immediately invites the audience to the cinema with the words “leftists will hate this film”.
Parallels are offered
According to AFP, the fact that the film premiered not long before the presidential election is drawing attention to it. It also received a decent commercial response. The film with a budget of 25 million dollars, which is converted to 564 million crowns, took 18.5 million dollars, i.e. around 418.5 million crowns, in the first two weekends in the USA and Canada. If he managed to succeed in some foreign markets as well, he could make a decent profit for the creators.
Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan. | Photo: Rob Batzdorff
For example, theater attendance analyst David A. Gross calls the sales very good for the genre – political biopics rarely reach dizzying numbers.
Interest has also been fueled by recent statements from actor Dennis Quaid and Jon Voight, who plays a fictional ex-spy from the Soviet KGB secret service. Together, they announced that Facebook was repeatedly censoring ads for the Reagan movie.
The company Meta, which owns the social network, reviewed the case and admitted that its algorithm had indeed mistakenly evaluated “several” ads for this image as pre-election advertising and therefore limited their reach. Since then, Meta has restored the reach of all ads, the company claims.
The biography was based on a book called The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, written in 2006 by Paul Kengor, an American political science professor at Grove City College, a Christian university in Pennsylvania.
The film tells the life of the 40th American president from his childhood through the period when he was a successful Hollywood actor to his political career.
The film Reagan does not yet have a Czech distributor. | Video: Rawhide Pictures
America used to be kinder
The director describes the fact that the film was released so shortly before the elections as more of a coincidence. He started working on the project in 2010, finally shooting it ten years later, but post-production was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic or last year’s strike by Hollywood screenwriters and actors.
“If you had seen the film in a non-election year, I think you would have been more aware of its cinematic side. Now people go to the cinema and are struck by various parallels,” says the director.
One such is offered right at the beginning – the story begins with the assassination attempt on Reagan in March 1981, just two months after being elected to office. For many viewers, the scene evokes the shooting of Republican candidate Donald Trump from this July.
At other times, Ronald Reagan faces university protests or touches on whether he is too old for office in a primary debate with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale. “We can find similarities to all of this in recent months. I’m a little scared myself, how many there are,” admits the director.
So far, he has mostly made films with Christian themes, so he is used to relatively negative reactions in the press. Still, the level of criticism surprised him. According to him, it illustrates how deeply divided the US is today. “During the Reagan administration, of course, it could also be pretty toxic, but America was a kinder, kinder country, where people had different political views, but were still able to get together for a drink or a barbecue,” says McNamara.
From the reviews, he has the impression that the film is particularly well received by those who have witnessed it. “Because they see what was possible in America then and is not anymore,” he thinks.
Ronald Reagan died in 2004, he was 93 years old. If he were still alive, according to the director, he would try to find a golden mean. “He was always a great communicator. I think if he saw it here today, he would be sorry for how little we try to find compromises,” Sean McNamara reflects on the current atmosphere in the US.
The foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (right) is considered to be one of the main causes of the collapse of communist regimes in Europe, along with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. | Photo: Reuters
Press reaction
Critics of the film criticize a lot. According to the New York Times, for example, the creators give the American statesman too much credit for the fall of the Soviet Union. Period scenes from the 1930s to the 1950s, on the other hand, “look as if the cameraman came across a sale of diffusion filters” softening the image just before the start of filming.
The Wall Street Journal believes that the picture is intended exclusively for Reagan supporters. The former KGB spy is played “on the edge of comedy” by Jon Voight, and the narrative suffers from a desperate lack of creativity.
“One thing the director really did was when he captures the funerals of three Soviet leaders in quick succession in 1982, 1984, and 1985 in a single scene with three corpses. Reagan shakes his head and asks, ‘How am I supposed to talk to them when they keep dying? ?'” quotes the newspaper, according to which a politician of Reagan’s importance still deserved a better film.
Magazine Forbes.com points out that while the film about Reagan is praised by American Republicans, supporters of the Democratic Party will also have “their” movie next month.
Shortly before the presidential elections in the USA, cinemas there will start screening the live drama The Apprentice, in which Sebastian Stan portrayed the young Donald Trump. He already criticized the news, in which his character rapes his wife, among other things, and announced that he would sue the creator.