Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever previewed three Reagan-at-100 documentaries, but he preferred the HBO version: "One of these is artfully nuanced and intellectually curious, which means it's on HBO." The pay-cable channel is known for going gushy over the Kennedys (and playing films by Kennedys), but Stuever hints that this film by Eugene Jarecki has lots of leftist gab in it:
Jarecki gets much more access to younger son Ron Reagan, now 52, who has just come out with a memoir ("My Father at 100"), and who, over the years, has evolved into generous yet frank authority on his father's personal and political complexities.
Jarecki's film is exceptionally organized and pretty fair - though something tells me it won't delight more conservative viewers, especially when left-leaning authors such as Will Bunch ("Tear Down This Myth") and Thomas Frank ("What's the Matter with Kansas?") surgically diagnose the ways in which the sunshine message of Reaganomics seduced the working middle class, to its own detriment. The film also manages to scintillate the basics of the Iran-contra affair in a way that makes it feel freshly scandalous.
Stuever even likes the music in the piece, and how it recalled the anti-Reagan side of the 1980s:
But it is Jarecki's film that most accesses the vibe of the '80s, down to its use of new-wave classics such as the Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" ("And you may tell yourself/This is not my beautiful house") and the aforementioned "99 Luftballons," a vaguely anti-nuke love song by German pop star Nena.
Here, Jarecki brushes up against the '80s I personally remember - a decade in which all the good pre-apocalyptic art and punk rock ("Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" by the Ramones!) and AIDS protests emanated from a mutual loathing of a president who seemed painfully detached.
Stuever found the History Channel version had less nuance, so it ends up less flattering:
Another "Reagan," this one a two-hour affair airing on History Channel on Wednesday night, organizes itself around the March 1981 assassination attempt by John Hinckley - one more anniversary, the 30th, is just around the corner. Shots go off at the Hilton and we flash back to Reagan's Illinois boyhood, working our way forward as he undergoes surgery.
History Channel's "Reagan" is a sturdily built timeline, making use of much of the same footage, talking points and talking heads that Jarecki does, only with less nuance. It also manages, in its equanimity, to paint a less flattering portrait. Facts and footage don't always do the Great Communicator any favors, even though he was supremely telegenic and personable. (As early as 1964, he is seen on camera saying that the millions of Americans then going to bed hungry each night "were on a diet.")
A callousness keeps pulling our attention away from Reagan's warmth and grandfatherly reassurances. Ron Reagan describes it best, how his father could relate to individual suffering on a personal level, but rarely in the abstract, as statistics. It was this, the son surmises, that enabled the president to ignore the AIDS crisis for most of the '80s, even as it claimed his friend Rock Hudson.
Facts about AIDS funding and (panic-stricken "we're all going to die of heterosexual AIDS" media coverage) don't match the "son's surmise." It's sad these documentaries are still recirculating Junior's "surmises" instead of the facts after all this time has elapsed.
