Cinematic history is made on August 30: For the first time, a movie about a historical figure is released on the same day as an unrelated movie about the person who once shot that historical figure. And movies begin with depictions of that assassination attempt.
The movies are Reagan, a long-in-the-works laudatory biopic of the 40th president, and Hinckley: I Shot the President, a documentary featuring interviews with John Hinckley, Jr., who shot Reagan and three others on March 30, 1981. Reagan is a mostly by-the-numbers biopic of Ronald Reagan, made by and for Reagan fans. It stars Dennis Quaid, who’s more believable as Reagan than he was as Bill Clinton in the British TV movie The Special Relationship. The film uses a counterintuitive framing device: An old KGB hand named Viktor Ivanov (Jon Voight) narrates how Reagan, from his Hollywood days through his presidency, outfoxed and outsmarted the Communists at every turn. But other than that, it mostly marches through Reagan’s Wikipedia page, providing the interpretation most favorable to Reagan of every significant event and controversy.
The film succeeds in its primary objective, which is to provide service for the aging cohort of Reagan partisans. The film plays the hits and invites audiences to cheer for “evil empire,” “tear down this wall,” and "please tell me you're Republicans,” the way they might cheer for Rocky or Iron Man.
We see Reagan, as president, give a speech using a parable to explain the major tenets of supply-side economics before deciding to fire the air traffic controllers in the same meeting.
This isn’t a balanced or warts-and-all portrayal. Iran-Contra is dealt with in about five minutes, the AIDS crisis in even less time, and the idea that Reagan might’ve had Alzheimer's while still president is raised and dismissed in about one sentence. The filmmakers managed to license the song and video for the anti-Reagan Genesis song “Land of Confusion,” although it uses that 1986 song in a montage before the 1984 election. That footage is also the film’s lone mention of the AIDS crisis.
“You are an actor. That is your job!, not politics!” Mena Suvari’s Jane Wyman sneers at him in the Reaganite version of the boxer’s unsupportive girlfriend in the first act of most boxing movies. Soon after, he meets Nancy Davis (the long-absent early-1990s actress Penelope Ann Miller), and the film depicts theirs as one of the great love stories of all time, even if Nancy Reagan is given no characterization behind encouraging Reagan to fight the Commies harder. Reagan’s children, meanwhile, are barely present.
The cast includes Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner and Scott Stapp as Frank Sinatra. C. Thomas Howell as Caspar Weinberger, the man who was Secretary of Defense around the time Howell was starring in Soul Man. Xander Berkeley, playing George Shultz, looks more like Vladimir Putin than Shultz. There’s a bearded speechwriter character named “Dana,” who I think is supposed to be Dana Rohrbacher, the Reagan speechwriter-turned-Congressman who, ironically, was often accused of being too solicitous towards the Russians.
Reagan was directed by Sean McNamara, a sound engineer at Reagan’s 1981 inauguration. It was based on Paul Kengor's biography The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, and filmed in 2020, although it was in the works as far back as 2010, in reaction to the 2003 mini-series The Reagans, which outraged Reagan fans.
In an age where Donald Trump has replaced Reagan as the dominant Republican president of most people’s lifetimes, does Reagan still matter? Time will tell, but the scene where Reagan, as California governor in the late-1960s, threatens college administrators about antiwar protests and why they shouldn’t let the kids run everything seems primed to deliver standing ovations from today’s audiences.
And then there’s the film about the guy who shot Reagan. John Hinckley was a disturbed young man who, after the release of Taxi Driver, became obsessed with actress Jodie Foster, writing her letters, stalking her, calling her and making recordings.
Seeking to impress her, he tracked down Reagan and shot him in Washington, outside the hotel that locals still call the “Hinckley Hilton.” Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity but was nevertheless confined to psychiatric facilities for more than 30 years.
He was released in 2016 and has since emerged with a YouTube channel where he sings original songs and plays guitar. He’s tried to play live gigs, although they’ve been canceled most of the time. This has made Hinckley one of the world’s least likely cancel culture martyrs. The documentary, directed by Neil McGregor, features interviews with Hinckley over the archival footage. Hinckley, who’s given very few interviews over the years, expresses “tremendous remorse” for what he did, from the stalking to the attempted presidential assassination.
As we saw with the Trump assassination attempt this summer, history has shown that people who take a shot at the president tend to be weirdos with inscrutable politics and motivations. Hinckley had no particular ideological quarrel with Reagan; he’d stalked Jimmy Carter in the later days of the 1980 campaign. As for Hinckley’s music, which we hear often in the film, it’s… not especially good. At one point, we see him reading the comments on his YouTube videos; whenever I’ve perused them, many people make versions of jokes like “This song is my second favorite thing you’ve ever done.”
I wonder why he’s not asked about “Unworthy of Your Love,” a song in the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins that features a “duet” between Hinckley and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Manson Family acolyte who tried to kill Gerald Ford in the 1970s.
Hinckley’s a monotone interview subject, but the documentary is valuable because he hasn’t talked at this length before.