I saw the Reagan biopic last week.

The movie was…good.  

Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:

Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.

The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.

As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly.  Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python.  Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.

So the movie was…good.   It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it. 

But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation.  Probably two generations. 

Is Reagan the movie to do it?  Maybe not. 

If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?  

Now there, we’re onto something. 

Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment.   At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within. 

And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president. 

The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale);  the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR. 

But this’ll do for now. 

For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home. 

But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.

Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing. 

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

 

The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.

Pass it along.