I watched bits and pieces of the vaunted “The Reagans” movie last night, and was struck by how very innocuous and boring it was. I compared it with a movie that seems to air incessantly on cable, “The Day Reagan Was Shot.” In the latter, Reagan and his staff are portrayed with much more rancor and stupidity than in the movie CBS dropped. His advisors are shown as bumbling old men, Nancy Reagan is played with particular venom by the incomparable Holland Taylor, and Richard Dreyfuss’ Alexander Haig is a power-mad pretender to the throne. And yet, I don’t remember the conservatives forcing that one off the air! Perhaps that’s because no one told them it was coming, unlike the latest film. Critics are focusing on the film’s “unfairness” to the former President, when they should focus on what a waste of time it is.
Aside from the boring script, the production value of “The Reagans” was horrible. Even the previously mentioned movie took a camera crew to Washington; this new film didn’t even bother to get locations that were slightly reminiscent of Washington locations. And one little thing that bothered me: you cannot see the Capitol dome from the palladian windows in the White House residence. You see the Treasury building on one end and the Old Executive Office Building on the other. It looked like a sitcom set, with a painted backdrop of the Capitol outside the window as if it’s next door — there is so much documentation of the White House interior, and one needs only look at a street map to see what is and isn’t visible from it. Heck, there have been incredibly accurate sets built of the White House before, why didn’t they just use those? While I am no huge fan of Reagan, I have to say that if the producers couldn’t be bothered to create a realistic environment for their little play, how much effort did they put into the rest of it?
