Comic actor Will Ferrell made a good decision Friday. He pulled out of “Reagan,” a comedy movie project that sought to portray Ronald Reagan’s presidency as the result of an intern skillfully manipulating him in his early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
What’s amazing, yet not surprising, is that anyone in Hollywood was dumb enough and tasteless enough to let this project get further than square one, or that one of America’s biggest comic actors would consider associating himself with it.
Ferrell pulled out after Patti Davis, Reagan’s daughter, expressed her anger about the project. The premise of this movie, which might still be made, is that an intern keeps a demented Reagan on track in the Oval Office and directs his presidency by convincing him that “he is an actor playing the president in a movie,” according to Variety magazine.
Hollywood sees no downside to mocking conservatives; it finds it both fun and profitable. Almost any conservative will do, but Reagan is the target the glitterati love most because he is so beloved of the people they so disdain and deprecate. He’s the target whose humiliation will cause his admirers most fury and sadness. What’s not to love.
Alzheimer’s disease, first diagnosed by German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer at the turn of the 20th Century, remains a poorly understood condition, but its effects are predictable. Neural degeneration gradually worsens to the point that Alzheimer’s patients become confused, and eventually cannot remember or even recognize family and friends. A laugh riot, no?
Reagan announced that he had the disease in a 1994 letter, and withdrew from public life for the next decade before he died.
Millions of Americans either suffer from Alzheimer’s or have friends or family who do. Thoughtful Hollywood portrayals of the disease are needed, including in movies that are lighthearted. It is possible to see a lighter side to a disease like this one, acknowledging both its tragic effects and the way life progresses for all involved in spite of them.
But this movie project sounded a lot more like an “exploitation film.” Ferrell was perfectly cast for a film whose plot has “goofball” written all over it but aimed, contemptibly, to perpetuate the left-liberal myth that Reagan was stupid.
One can just imagine how well this pitch went over in Hollywood, and why someone like Lena Dunham would have participated in a reading of the script. Here we have a movie with the premise that Ronald Reagan, the bete noire of Left Coast liberalism, is a doddering old fool who does doddering old fool things.
An intern directs the course of his presidency from behind the scenes by playing on his doddering old fool tendencies and persuading him that he lives in an alternate reality.
The entertainment industry, though deeply amoral and cynical, prides itself on a perverse ability to manipulate the morality of others into an uninformed, emotive embrace of its political causes.
Yet the industry’s understanding of how such manipulation works, and how it can backfire, would normally prevent a project like this one from seeing the light of day. Were this movie about anyone but Reagan, it wouldn’t have even been drawn to the attention of a bankable star. But it’s Reagan, so Hollywood couldn’t help itself.
