In today's NYT, Jim Rutenberg writes a long and well-reported piece on the controversy surrounding an upcoming TV biopic on the Reagans. The show doesn't sound like a complete hatchet job--we are, after all, dealing with popular entertainment on a popular president--but Rutenberg turns up one extreme distortion of Reagan's character:
The script also accuses Mr. Reagan not only of showing no interest in addressing the AIDS crisis, but of asserting that the patients of AIDS essentially deserved their disease. During a scene in which his wife pleads with him to help people battling AIDS, Mr. Reagan says resolutely, "They that live in sin shall die in sin" and refuses to discuss the issue further.
Lou Cannon, who has written several biographies about Mr. Reagan, said such a portrayal was unfair. "Reagan is not intolerant," he said. "He was a bit asleep at the switch, but that's not fair to have him say something that Patrick Buchanan would say."
And after all the suits' talk of balance, fairness, and good story-telling, Judy Davis, who plays Nancy Reagan, blurts out this amazing view of contemporary America:
"With the climate that has been in America since Sept. 11, it appears, from the outside anyway, to not be quite as open a society as it used to be," Ms. Davis said during an interview at her hotel in Montreal. "By open, I mean as free in terms of a critical atmosphere, and that sort of ugly specter of patriotism."
She added, "If this film can help create a bit more questioning in the public about the direction America has been going in since the 1970's, I guess then I think it will be doing a service."
The ugly specter of patriotism. Well, Reagan certainly stood for that. |
