Variety announced this week that comedian Will Ferrell will star as Ronald
Reagan in a movie described as an “hilarious political satire” about the former President’s onset of
Alzheimer’s. Welcome to the lowest depths of contemporary comedy.
Screenwriter Mike Rosolio has
penned a script that is apparently so popular in Hollywood that it was
voted to the 2015 Black List of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. Here
is the logline for Reagan: “The story
begins at the start of the ex-president’s second term when he falls into
dementia and an ambitious intern is tasked with convincing the commander in
chief that he is an actor playing the president in a movie.”
I have not read the script, so if the movie
proves me wrong I will happily apologize. But it is hard to imagine that
comedian Will Ferrell, noted for his denigrating impressions of George W. Bush
and his progressive activism at the comedy site “Funny or Die,” will portray
Reagan as anything other than buffoonish.
A live table reading of the screenplay featuring Lena
Dunham as Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan and John Cho as the intern
protagonist was held back in March (Ferrell was not attached to the project at
the time). Showbiz website TheWrap reports that the reading “was very well-received.”
Of course it was, because frankly, the Hollywood left finds the notion of
depicting the former actor Reagan as an addled Norma Desmond in the
White House to be side-splittingly funny.
A darkly funny satire is one thing (see, for
example, Dr. Strangelove, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring the brilliant Peter
Sellers; for a good satire about an American President that everyone can enjoy,
try another Sellers film, Being There),
but no matter who the victim is, the idea of an “Alzheimer’s comedy” (that’s
actually how TheWrap described it) is beyond tasteless. Let’s be honest,
though: the only reason Hollywood finds the concept acceptable is that it
targets a revered conservative icon.
The filmmakers surely knew that the film’s very
concept would outrage at least half the country. As a conservative myself who
believes that Ronald Reagan was our greatest President in my lifetime, I’m not
whining about the movie simply because it ridicules a sacred cow of mine; I’m
complaining because it is vile to ridicule the man on the basis of his
affliction. If Barack Obama were suffering from Alzheimer’s, I would be just as
disapproving of a movie about that (although we all know such a movie would
never even be considered in left-leaning Hollywood).
Furthermore, the movie will alienate not just
conservatives but anyone whose life has been touched by the disease, as well as
anyone who simply has a standard of decency, because, politics aside, an
Alzheimer’s victim is no more appropriate a central character for comedy than
an AIDS victim. This movie will bomb, so one has to assume that the Reagan filmmakers green-lighted this
travesty as a perverse sort of virtue-signaling to others of their political
stripe in Hollywood.
Comedy once was used to bring people
together. Nothing unites and uplifts people like laughter. Comedians in my
youth recognized this and aimed to entertain a broad audience. Today, comedy tragically
(pun intended) has become politicized and divisive – sometimes grotesquely and
viciously so, as in the case of the Reagan
movie. Giving offense seems to be the preferred intent of many comics today,
but since young audiences now are so straightjacketed by political correctness
that they take offense at almost anything, comedians hone in on the only target
still culturally acceptable to ridicule: conservatives. Comics like Sarah
Silverman, Bill Maher, and Will Ferrell go out of their way to offend and
alienate half the population instead of finding humor in the themes of our
common humanity.
Political humor is a legitimate and even vital
form of social commentary. Any president’s policies are fair game. Screenwriter
Rosolio could have chosen to focus on Reagan’s policies and make a movie even
conservatives could enjoy. But linking those policies to a terrifying and
heartbreaking disorder that ultimately (in conjunction with pneumonia) killed
the ex-President, and that still ravages minds and bodies and families today,
is a bridge too far.
As a society, we must voluntarily pull back
from a bottomless pit of tastelessness. We can protect free speech but still
hold ourselves accountable to standards and boundaries. The Reagan filmmakers have the right to make
their movie, and we have the right to turn our backs on it.
Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis
witnessed her father’s suffering and has since gone on to run a support group
for those affected by Alzheimer’s. On her website, Davis penned a devastating open letter to Will Ferrell in which she asked him how
he intended to explain to the victims of Alzheimer’s and their families “how
this disease is suitable material for a comedy.” Perhaps, she suggests, to
prepare for his role, “you would like to visit some dementia facilities. I have
— I didn’t find anything comedic there.”
UPDATE: Ferrell's manager is now saying that his client had merely been considering Reagan as one of many potential projects and will not produce and star in it as Variety had announced. Hopefully the kind of pushback he received for his involvement with this movie will result in the other filmmakers rethinking it as well.
UPDATE: Ferrell's manager is now saying that his client had merely been considering Reagan as one of many potential projects and will not produce and star in it as Variety had announced. Hopefully the kind of pushback he received for his involvement with this movie will result in the other filmmakers rethinking it as well.
From Acculturated, 4/29/16
