There is a new Reagan movie out in theaters. This is very unexpected news, partly because we don’t get many historical movies, especially not movies aimed at adults, and, above all, not movies about figures liberals hate. Liberals hated Reagan. More than they hated Bush or Trump? Hard to say. But one consequence was that the once upon a time Hollywood actor who became the best dressed president and won the Cold War was denied glamour or even memorialization in liberal-dominated institutions.
If you had asked me, I would have guessed the Hollywood version of the damnatio memoriae of the great man would continue so long as Boomers matter in entertainment. I’m not sure I was wrong, but there are now some exceptions. Back in 2024, the biopic Reagan came out, starring Dennis Quaid in a remarkably believable role. A pleasant movie, cradle-to-grave storytelling, with the only real merit that it conveys the major facts of Reagan’s life. Anyone aware of Reagan would begin to sense that he must have been a great man.
Now we have a significantly more ambitious movie, The Brink Of War, starring Jeff Daniels, focusing on the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik on October 11–12, 1986. Writer-producer-director Michael Russell Gunn has assembled a remarkable cast headed by Daniels, with Jarred Harris as Gorbachev, J. K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Shultz, and Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. Filmed in Iceland, the story benefits both from the atmosphere of reclusion at the frozen volcanic end of the world and the dramatic focus of the beautiful Höfði house where the discussions take place—politicians on the upper level, the CIA and KGB in the basement.
It will take a minute or two to get used to Daniels, an infamously liberal celebrity, as Reagan, but then you will buy it. His demeanor and voice are very much Reagan’s, and above all his characterization captures Reagan’s great combination of dignity and comedy. If anything, you will end up faulting Daniels for running away with the show. But this is unlikely—we have so few occasions to see Reagan onscreen that it’s a treat to get such a bravura performance.
The major surprise of the movie is how incredibly pro-Reagan it is. It is pro-American generally, and pro-American Cold War policy, but above all, it is pro-Reagan. The drama is meant to evoke in the audience a great familiarity with Reagan, based on the one hand on his jokes, of which we hear many, more, at any rate, than one would have expected from a tense Cold War arms reduction negotiation story, and, on the other, on Reagan’s private vulnerability, his health and his love for Nancy, who did not accompany him, but with whom he shares the burden in telephone conversations.
The vision of a leader of a democracy, a human being like you and me, a husband, is deepened dramatically and rhetorically to the level of principle and action. Reagan’s strangest side as a politician was his opposition to nuclear weapons and his ardent hope that they could all be somehow gotten rid of. In The Brink of War, this passionate attachment to America and to humanity in general is developed at some length, but as part of a political plan. Reagan’s humanitarianism is limited and guided by good sense. He’s no bleeding-heart liberal, of course—nor is he shy about defending the American principle of equal freedom or condemning Communist tyranny.
If this is an idealizing portrait, it has the merit of reminding us that wisdom counts more than most things—the all-American confidence is based on competence here. Reagan understood the fundamentals of the political situation and knew how to deal with people. He deals well with Gorbachev in the story, but also with his own staff. He’s every bit the chief executive officer, in charge of his experts as much as of his cabinet, as sure of his subjects as of his speeches.
This most rhetorical president knew he had to bypass rhetoric and prove by deed that America was stronger, more united, and more patient.
The Brink Of War is overdone in some ways—for example, the title and the dramatic insistence that the world was about to explode in a nuclear fireball in 1986. This is not true and it may cause the custodians of our national history—who ought to be the movie’s major audience—to take umbrage. But I hope it doesn’t, because the movie is largely true to events and a useful introduction to the late Cold War. To the extent to which liberties are taken, it is done to please the audience with thrills, and if it is not quite sober, the movie has the qualities of being patriotic and intelligent. When you see the movie, which you should, you will see the clever twists of the plot, which I won’t spoil. One cannot say these artistic touches are better than the history, but artists must be allowed some freedom.
The Brink of War may satisfy liberals, too, since it idealizes Gorbachev as much as Reagan: Liberals are the kinds of people who damned Reagan as a warmonger, as the movie reminds us, but gave Gorbachev the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. But this dramatic attitude has the great merit of comparing America and the Soviet Union at their best—it may remind us that it is best to judge political regimes by their leaders. Gorbachev is tough; he understands that his empire is in danger of collapse; he also understands that the failures of the Soviet system could come not only from its tyranny and corruption, but also from loss of confidence. So his toughness, which is in a way a put-on, is also a necessity of his political situation. American greatness really is a threat to him—it can discredit communism.
Reagan compares Americans and Soviets as follows: We’re all human beings who need protection and want to escape the threat of war, but we’re also different: The role played by religion in American life is played by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In this analysis, American victory comes as a consequence of the greater plausibility of Christianity to Progress. Lenin famously claimed that Communism was Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country, but this turned out not to be true: Soviets eventually had to choose between the tech and the tyranny—they chose the latter. Reagan, contrariwise, could rearm America and even dared to put forward the Strategic Defense Initiative, an anti-atomic shield. The ultimate implication is that religion is a better master of tech than the kind of ideologies derived from modern philosophy. So what seemed like a side issue in the negotiations—the human rights of religious people tyrannized by the Soviet Union—reveals the fundamental conflict.
The difficulty of this analysis is that Reagan needs Gorbachev, since he can only deal with the Communist Party—he needs a counterparty, politically—but must weaken him, ruin his reputation, since he intends to win the Cold War. The movie’s most daring attempt is to convey Reagan’s political strategy dramatically in this regard. The Strategic Defense Initiative is what scares Gorbachev, why he wanted to meet Reagan, and what Reagan can’t compromise on. However much the American elites were against Reagan, the solidity of his conviction and the confidence of the American people sufficed to make his position much stronger than Gorbachev’s. His best negotiating strategy was a failure of negotiation. This most rhetorical president knew he had to bypass rhetoric and prove by deed that America was stronger, more united, and more patient.
The movie brings out this very interesting problem, Soviet collectivism versus American individualism, in a strange way. According to his custom, Reagan appeals to what everyone will admit, or the principles of his adversary—he quotes the Russian proverb he so liked: Trust, but verify. A statement against ideology, against tyranny. A reminder of peasant skepticism—the glamour of Soviet evil may convince intellectuals who are all tyrants in training, but anyone with sense or cunning could see through it.
Reagan also tells the following Soviet joke, which was also a habit of his: A man waits in a long breadline until he gets so angry that he says, I’m leaving, I’m going to go kill Gorbachev. Everyone is shocked; then everyone is shocked again an hour later, when he returns, defeated: The queue for people waiting to kill Gorbachev is even longer than the breadline. There is no legitimacy—only fear. But Gorbachev has the ugly answer: He never did get shot, unlike Reagan.
The political correlative of this problem of the leader’s life is war. In order to win a world war America had not started, America invented a nuclear weapon that has since terrified so many, although it has not been used since 1945. Is peace among global powers even imaginable without it? Maybe the movie’s greatest merit—and the secret meaning of its title, The Brink Of War, recalling brinkmanship—is that it brings up at a rather high level these old questions that are new again, since America has a peer competitor in China that may be more threatening than even the Soviet Union was. Everything that seemed settled by Reagan has come unsettled. A generation later, America is again in great danger and again trying to rearm.
