subject: Can Red State dwellers trust upcoming Reagan documentary? [print this page] Can Red State dwellers trust upcoming Reagan documentary?
Conservatives movie goers should steel themselves for a new documentary making its Sundance Film Festival debut next month.
"Reagan," by filmmaker Eugene Jarecki ("Why We Fight"), promises a fair account of the GOP icon according to Jarecki's brother, Andrew.
Andrew Jarecki told this reporter last week the upcoming documentary offers "a really unique take on a person" with "a lot of ambiguity."
"Ronald Reagan was neither devil nor saint. Yet he's been turned into this icon. In reality, he's a complex person," Andrew Jarecki says of his brother's project.
Sounds great on the surface. But it wouldn't be the first time an unfair and unbalanced project was described in such moderate terms.
Consider "Fair Game," the retelling of the Valerie Plame outing so blatantly dishonest The Washington Post used its house editorial space to condemn it. Yet "Fair Game" director Doug Liman told reporters he adhered to court transcripts to hew as close to the truth as possible.
Balderdash.
There's reason to assume Eugene Jarecki's "Reagan" film won't treat the subject fairly. He contributes to the liberal Huffington Post and his "Why We Fight" feature is hardly the work of a neocon filmmaker in action. That doesn't mean he couldn't whip up a razzle dazzle documentary on Reagan that neither deifies nor denigrates him, but he enters the project with a clearly left of center mindset
Reagan is nothing less than a legend to those on the Right, and he's beloved even by those who don't swear allegiance to the GOP. Will the film take unfair swipes at him in order to please a small segment of the movie-going public profits be darned?
A previous biopic of the late president doesn't give us hope. "The Reagans," a mini-series originally slated for CBS but later punted off to Showtime, put some pretty cruel words in Reagan's mouth in order to make him look like a monster.
Documentaries deal in facts, or, at least they should. But we've seen too many examples lately of directors fudging the truth by errors of omission, cutesy editing and using biased experts to nudge the narrative.
A fair, honest account of President Reagan would make a powerful documentary. We'll have to see what the real deal offers next month.
