Cheesecake, Beefcake

I had several tangential connections to the Reagan White House.

At one point I met a low-level Reagan State Department appointee, who I dated for a month or two. (When we parted I said I’d thought I was dating Elliott Abrams, but I was only dating Selwa Roosevelt. That was the most mature thing I said or did. I was young. And didn’t realize Roosevelt had a storied career before being a head of protocol.) My lover was from a goy Midwest family with Senators and such among the uncles or grandfathers, and a trust fund.

But what is relevant to the current movie Reagan is that his State Department political appointee came to him because initially he worked in the White House as an assistant to Helene von Damm. Von Damm was a good-looking and ambitious woman, an Austrian immigrant. (She divorced her first husband, an American military officer she met in Europe, because she found him lacking in ambition.) According to my paramour, when Nancy Reagan saw von Damm working in the White House, and learned she met with and briefed President Reagan daily, she had von Damm relocated to the State Department. And with her went my boyfriend of that season, no longer a White House staffer, but now a very minor, lower-level political appointee.

Reagan is a love story as much as a biopic. At various points Nancy (the lovely Penelope Ann Miller) and Ronnie (a prosthetically “enhanced” Dennis Quaid) discuss between themselves or with others how Ronnie’s the charming good cop, the optimist who leads us to the shining city on the hill, and Nancy’s the pessimist, the risk assessor, the damage controller, who looks for storms on the horizon and steers her crew around them. So she steered the couple around the tempest or temptress of Helen von Damm. There are very few young female hotties in this movie, though there are at least three hot young actors: David Henrie as the young Reagan as a high school aged lifeguard, Trevor Donovan as a Secret Service agent promoted to the ranch because of his equestrian skills and Alex Sparrow as a young commie in the Kremlin. Maybe Nancy really thoroughly eliminated attractive young women from the Reagan White House.

Von Damm is one of the many personalities of the Reagan White House (including libertarian policy advisor Martin Anderson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others) who do not appear in this movie. Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife, appears briefly. Like von Damm with her first husband, the regal Wyman seems to have been happy to unwed Ronald Reagan because his movie career, as a B-list actor, was evaporating, and she found him lacking ambition. (In her autobiography Forever Young, Haley Mills recounts how when a movie wrapped that both actresses were in, Wyman, a Dodgers fan, had a giant screen TV, beer, soda, popcorn and hot dogs rolled onto the set so everyone could stay and watch a game with her.)

It’s a good, not great movie. The Reagans were never wealthy, so what I suspect is a limit of budget fits in fine with shots of the Reagan ranch, a large spread of land but a very unrenovated house with small warren-like rooms. Miller and Quaid are excellent. The director has CGIed actors into newsreel footage of events like the presidential debates, so that no one was needed to play Walter Mondale, who’s there as a digitized wraith to play himself. A huge crew of conservative Hollywooders (Robert Davi, Nick Searcy, Kevin Sorbo, Jon Voight) appear in supporting roles.

It’s a sweet movie that dramatizes the timeline of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s also a very family-oriented film, all about a long-lasting marriage, and thanks to Nancy I bet, cheesecake, if not beefcake, free.