Television/Film Review: The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001)

Ronald Reagan is generally considered to be among the greatest of US Presidents and 20th Century statesmen. He is credited with bringing an exhausting economic crisis to an end, forging victory in the Cold War, and bringing freedom and democracy to the nations of Eastern Europe. Yet, all that seemed very unlikely on March 30th, 1981, the day which is the subject of The Day Reagan Was Shot, a 2001 television film written and directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh.

The plot shows that the day began like any other. Ronald Reagan (played by Richard Crenna), only a few months after his inauguration, goes to the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. to hold a routine speech. He doesn’t know that a certain individual named John Hinckley Jr. (played by Christian Lloyd) has chosen his assassination as a way to impress Hollywood star Jodie Foster. He empties the revolver, and the next 24 hours are about to be challenging for the United States and the world. As this happens, US Vice President George H. W. Bush (played by Michael Greene), the first official in the line of succession, is travelling by plane, far from Washington. Doctors in the hospital need some time to realise that the President is not only hit by a ricocheting bullet but actually seriously hurt and that his life is hanging by a thread. At the same time, White House officials try their best to convince the American and world public that everything was all right. At that very moment, Alexander Haig (played by Richard Dreyfuss), the ambitious Secretary of State, sees this as an opportunity to establish his authority and starts a chain of events that would bring America to the edge of a coup d’etat and nuclear cataclysm.

Made for the Showtime network, The Day Reagan Was Shot shows how US cable television at the start of the 21st Century delivered more quality content than mainstream feature films. Nowrasteh (a film maker who would later become famous for his politically charged and controversial film The Stoning of Soraya M.) didn’t have much of a budget, but he compensated for it with an excellent cast, headed by veteran Richard Dreyfuss, who was great in playing the tragic character of Haig. Richard Crenna and Holland Taylor are also great as Reagan and his wife Nancy; they work hard to portray their characters as human beings and avoid any cartoonish depiction. Nowrasteh has based his script on authentic documents and testimonies, although there were critics accusing him of embellishing certain events and making them look more exciting and dramatic than in real history. Nowrasteh, however, knows how to build tension, and although most viewers, even those with the most basic knowledge of history, know how the day actually ended, The Day Reagan Was Shot is a very intriguing film. It was originally aired only months after 9/11 and, in light of those events, it was quite interesting to see how the world’s most powerful nation came to the edge of the abyss over a prosaic set of circumstances and how people with the most noble intentions came close to making fatal mistakes. Another interesting fact is that one of the producers was Oliver Stone, a leftist film maker known for his critical stance towards Reagan’s administration, which is in this shown almost with compassion. With a little more discipline and tighter editing, Nowrasteh could have delivered a masterpiece, but even in its present state, The Day Reagan Was Shot is one of the better reconstructions of America’s 20th Century history.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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