The long-awaited movie about the life of Ronald Reagan officially premiered on Friday. And reactions to it are already coming out swiftly.

Even political opposites agree that Reagan was not only a president of consequence but easily the most significant conservative figure of the 20th Century. It is no surprise that the film, the result of several years of work by director Sean MacNamara and shot in part at the Reagan Ranch in California owned by the Young America’s Foundation, is a big hit with conservatives. Conservative organizations such as the Thomas Jefferson Institute in Virginia and numerous Republican Party outlets nationwide hosted early showings of Reagan.

It is also not surprising to find Reagan panned by notably liberal outlets such as the Washington Post and the Daily Beast. “As history, it’s worthless,” concluded Post reviewer Ty Burr. The Beast went further, labeling Reagan “Worst Movie of the Year.”

Based on Grove City College professor Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader” about Reagan’s pivotal role in the downfall of the Soviet Union, the film portrays its hero’s rise from college athlete and sports announcer to Hollywood actor and head of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). From there, we see Reagan’s involvement with politics campaigning for fellow conservative and 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, leading to his election as governor of California in 1966 and president in 1980.

While most of this is nothing new for Americans who watched the rise of the 40th president and are familiar with his story, one notable characteristic brought out by starring actor Dennis Quaid is Reagan’s positive nature and lifelong optimism. While motivated by strong beliefs, Reagan, we see, almost never took disagreements personally or was disagreeable toward any opponents. We see him and first wife Jane Wyman (Mena Suvari) dining with several show business colleagues, including screenwriter (and later one of the Communist “Hollywood Ten”) Dalton Trumbo (Sean Hankinson), who argues Communism will come to the film industry. Reagan disagrees but is not disagreeable with Trumbo.

In a similar vein, we see Reagan clearly disagreeing with 1980 Democratic presidential opponent Jimmy Carter but in their lone televised debate, dismissing Carter’s charge he was against Medicare with a chuckle and the phrase “There you go again!”

Although opponents of Vladimir Putin frequently liken the Russian strongman to Hitler or even Satan, spirited anti-Communist Reagan never personalized his disagreement with the Soviet Union’s bosses. It was their system he despised and what he called “the evil empire” it controlled and not the individuals in the Kremlin. After Soviet leaders Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko — all shown chain-smoking in the movie — die within Reagan’s first term, the U.S. president is asked why he never met with a Russian head of government, and he replies: “They keep dying on me.”

At the urging of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (well-played by British actress Lesley Anne Down), Reagan finally did meet with the man she calls “a different kind of Russian” — Mikhail Gorbachev (Aleksander Krupa), much younger than his predecessors and well-traveled outside of Russia. After a rocky start in their discussions of arms control, Reagan and Gorbachev finally reached an accommodation in 1987. That same year, the American president delivered his powerful speech at the Berlin Wall, culminating in: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” Two years later, the wall did come down and two years after that, the Soviet Union.

Inevitably, historians, and specifically Kremlinologists, ask whether Reagan was the key figure in the downfall of the Soviet Union or would its demise have occurred no matter who was president. Kengor’s book, and the movie, strongly suggest the former — that while the Communist system was becoming too immense and costly to sustain itself, it was Reagan who reversed the “détente” policy of the three previous presidents of accommodating Moscow and began re-building the U.S. military. His vision of the Cold War, as Quaid summarizes it on screen, is: “We win, they lose.”

Reagan’s focus on Communism and its defeat is told in the movie by retired KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (Jon Voight) in a meeting with up-and-coming Russian politician Andrei Novikov (Alex Sparrow). Their discussion, in which Petrovich recalls watching Reagan closely since his SAG presidency, is fiction and whether Novikov is actually an apocryphal Putin is questionable.

The major dispute among reviewers of Reagan is whether it is, as the Washington Post’s Burr wrote, “a hagiography as rosy and shallow as anything in a Kremlin May Day parade” or an accurate remembrance of an important president. Perhaps the best answer is that a film on the life of a president depends in large part on whether it is made at a time that president is still loved.

Like Reagan, Wilson (1944) was made twenty years after the death of its subject and, shown at a time when the U.S. was engaged in the Second World War long predicted by Woodrow Wilson. Alexander Knox’s portrayal of him borders on being heroic, and we never see any negative side of Wilson such as his ordering that all government offices be segregated. In Reagan, we do see the 40th president admitting in 1987 the U.S. was indeed trading arms for hostages with Iran in violation of stated policy.

Ronald Reagan is fondly remembered by most Americans and many who did not share his conservatism will nonetheless say his good nature and positive attitude are what are sorely needed in the toxic politics of today. That alone makes the new movie on his life worth seeing and discussing.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.

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