At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

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When Americans went to the polls last week, they wanted cheaper food. Groceries really are more expensive than they used to be, and grocery costs are how many Americans make sense of the state of the economy at large. In September, Pew Research Center reported that three-quarters of Americans were “very concerned” about them. And this month, many of those people voted for Donald Trump, the candidate who touted his distance from the economic policy of the last four years, and who promised repeatedly to lower prices.

But two of Trump’s other big promises—mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more restrictive trade regulations—would almost certainly raise food prices, economists told me. American-grown staples would get more expensive owing to a domestic labor shortage, and imported foods would too, because they would be subject to double-digit import taxes. This cause-and-effect dynamic “could be my final exam,” Rachel Friedberg, who teaches “Principles of Economics” at Brown University, told me. “It’s just very straightforward principles of economics.”

The main issue is labor. American farming depends on undocumented workers; if the Trump administration were to enact “the largest deportation operation in American history” and deport every undocumented immigrant living in the United States, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the people who plant our crops and pick our fruit would leave the domestic workforce. Proponents of immigration enforcement typically say these jobs could be taken by documented or American-born workers. But the farm industry is already in a prolonged labor crisis, and undocumented immigrants tend to be willing to work for less money—that’s why employers hire them, even though it’s illegal. Fewer workers means higher wages means higher prices, straight up.

[Read: Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation]

Some farms might be able to get by shorthanded, at least for a little while. Some might embrace technology more quickly, investing in automated systems that could help fill the labor gap. But that would take time, and as David Anderson, a Texas A&M University agricultural economist, told me, “You gotta get the cows milked and fed every day.” America’s agricultural system relies on hands and feet, arms and legs, day in and day out.

If the Trump administration does, in fact, deport millions of people, produce prices would likely increase the most, Bradley Rickard, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, told me in an email, because “labor represents a significant share of total costs.” Prices would probably go up quickest and most dramatically for the crops that are most labor-intensive to harvest: strawberries, mushrooms, asparagus, cherries. So would those for the foods farmed in California, which grows three-quarters of the fruit and nuts, and a third of the vegetables, produced domestically, and is home to about half of the country’s undocumented agricultural workers.

Mass deportations would also drive up prices for dairy and meat, whose industries have also been in a labor shortage, for at least the past half decade. According to a 2022 analysis from the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants and seeks to shape immigration policy, a scarcity of workers led the median wage in the dairy and meat sectors to increase 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022, and prices to rise between 4.5 and 7 percent. In 2015, Anderson and some colleagues conducted a survey on behalf of the dairy industry and found that eliminating immigrants from the sector would reduce production, put farms out of business, and cause retail milk prices to increase by about 90 percent.

Anderson’s study is 10 years old, and assumed a total loss of all immigrant labor, documented and undocumented. Last week, he told me that he has no reason to believe the dynamic wouldn’t hold to a lesser degree if a smaller amount of the workforce were deported now. “We wouldn’t be able to produce all the stuff that we do today. Less production means less supplies,” he said, “and less supplies means food prices would go up.”

Immigration policy affects food that is grown domestically. But about 15 percent of the American food supply is imported, including about 60 percent of fresh fruit, 80 percent of seafood, 90 percent of avocados, and 99 percent of coffee. Our reliance on, or taste for, imported goods has ticked up steadily over the past few decades, as we have become accustomed to Italian olive oil and raspberries in winter. On the campaign trail, Trump proposed taxing these—and all—imported goods, in an attempt to raise domestic production and to reduce the deficit. If his plan goes through, Chinese imports—which include large amounts of the fish, seafood, garlic, spices, tea, and apple juice we consume—would be subject to 60 to 100 percent tariffs. All other imports would be subject to 10 to 20 percent tariffs. Those taxes would be passed onto consumers, especially in the short term, as domestic production ramps up (if it can ramp up), and especially if undocumented immigrants are simultaneously leaving the workforce. “There’s no safety valve,” Marcus Noland, the executive vice president and director of studies at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “If you start deporting people, it’s not like you can import the product and make up for it if you have these tariffs.”

[Read: The immigration-wage myth]

We all need food to live, and all food needs to come from somewhere. The process by which it makes it to our plate is complicated, resource-intensive, and subject to the vagaries of policy, weather, disease, and labor supply. The system does not have a large amount of slack built into it. If sticker-shocked milk fans start gravitating toward other drinks, those prices will also go up. If California’s berry industry is squeezed by a labor shortage, and the market for imported berries is squeezed by tariffs, berries will cost more.

And although farms are the biggest employer of undocumented workers, these workers are also a major part of the mechanism that processes, butchers, cooks, and delivers our food, from the sprawling poultry-processing plants of the South to the local fried-chicken place. The restaurant industry—which employs more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a Center for American Progress analysis—is already struggling to fill jobs, which is driving higher prices; even a small reduction in the workforce would increase operating costs, which will almost definitely result in either restaurants closing or costs being passed onto eaters.

The immigration and tariff policies, in other words, would affect all the food we eat: snacks, school lunches, lattes, pet food, fast food, fancy restaurant dinners. People will not stop eating if food gets more expensive; they will just spend more of their money on it.

Trump’s team proposed deportations and tariffs as a way to fix America’s inflation-addled economy. But voters are unlikely to be comforted by what they see over the next few years. Toward the end of our call, I asked Friedberg if she could see any scenario under which, if the new administration’s policies are enacted, prices don’t go up. “No,” she said, without pausing. “I am extremely confident that food will get more expensive. Buy those frozen vegetables now.”

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jen Balderama, a Culture editor who leads the Family section and works on stories about parenting, language, sex, and politics (among other topics).

Jen grew up training as a dancer and watching classic movies with her mom, which instilled in her a love for film and its artistry. Her favorites include Doctor Zhivago, In the Mood for Love, and Pina; she will also watch anything starring Cate Blanchett, an actor whose “ability to inhabit is simply unmatched.”

The Culture Survey: Jen Balderama

My favorite blockbuster film: I’m grateful that when I was quite young, my mom started introducing me to her favorite classic movies—comedies, romances, noirs, epics—which I’m pretty sure had a lasting influence on my taste. So for a blockbuster, I have to go with a nostalgia pick: Doctor Zhivago. The hours we spent watching this movie, multiple times over the years, each viewing an afternoon-long event. (The film, novelty of novelties, had its own intermission!) My mom must have been confident that the more adult elements—the rape, the politics—would go right over my head, but that I could appreciate the movie for its aesthetics. She had a huge crush on Omar Sharif and swooned over the soft-focus close-ups of his watering eyes. I was entranced by the landscapes and costumes and sets—the bordello reds of the Sventitskys’ Christmas party, the icy majesty of the Varykino dacha in winter. But I was also taken by the film’s sheer scope, its complexity, and the fleshly and revolutionary messiness. I’m certain it helped ingrain in me, early, an enduring faith in art and artists as preservers of humanity, especially in dark, chaotic times. [Related: Russia from within: Boris Pasternak’s first novel]

My favorite art movie: May I bend the rules? Because I need to pick two: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Wim Wenders’s Pina. One is fiction, the other documentary. Both are propelled by yearning and by music. Both give us otherworldly depictions of bodies in motion. And both delve into the ways people communicate when words go unspoken.

In the Mood for Love might be the dead-sexiest film I’ve ever seen, and no one takes off their clothes. Instead we get Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a ravishing tango of loaded phone calls and intense gazes, skin illicitly brushing skin, figures sliding past each other in close spaces: electricity.

Pina is Wenders’s ode to the German choreographer Pina Bausch, a collaboration that became an elegy after Bausch died when the film was in preproduction. Reviewing the movie for The New York Times in 2017, the critic Gia Kourlas, whom I admire, took issue with one of Wenders’s choices: In between excerpts of Bausch’s works, her dancers sit for “interviews,” but they don’t speak to camera; recordings of their voices play as they look toward the audience or off into the distance. Kourlas wrote that these moments felt “mannered, self-conscious”; they made her “wince.” But to me, a (highly self-conscious) former dancer, Wenders nailed it—I’ve long felt more comfortable expressing myself through dance than through spoken words. These scenes are a brilliantly meta distillation of that tension: Dancers with something powerful to say remain outwardly silent, their insights played as inner narrative. Struck by grief, mouths closed, they articulate how Bausch gave them the gift of language through movement—and thus offered them the gift of themselves. Not for nothing do I have one of Bausch’s mottos tattooed on my forearm: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

An actor I would watch in anything: Cate Blanchett. Her ability to inhabit is simply unmatched: She can play woman, man, queen, elf, straight/gay/fluid, hero/antihero/villain. Here I’m sure I’ll scandalize many of our readers by saying out loud that I am not a Bob Dylan person, but I watched Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There precisely because Blanchett was in it—and her roughly 30 minutes as Dylan were all I needed. She elevates everything she appears in, whether it’s deeply serious or silly. I’m particularly captivated by her subtleties, the way she turns a wrist or tilts her head with the grace and precision of a dancer’s épaulement. (Also: She is apparently hilarious.)

An online creator I’m a fan of: Elle Cordova, a musician turned prolific writer of extremely funny, often timely, magnificently nerdy poems, sketches, and songs, performed in a winning low-key deadpan. I was tipped off to her by a friend who sent a link to a video and wrote: “I think I’m falling for this woman.” The vid was part of a series called “Famous authors asking you out”—Cordova parroting Jane Austen, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe (“Should I come rapping at your chamber door, or do you wanna rap at mine?”), Dr. Seuss, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (“And what if we were to talk a pretty yes in the endbegin of riverflow and moon’s own glimpsing heartclass …”). She does literature. She does science. She parodies pretentious podcasters; sings to an avocado; assumes the characters of fonts, planets, ChatGPT, an election ballot. Her brain is a marvel; no way can AI keep up.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Lego Masters Australia. Technically, we found this one together, but I watch Lego Masters because my 10-year-old is a Lego master himself—he makes truly astonishing creations!—and this is the kind of family entertainment I can get behind: Skilled obsessives, working in pairs, turn the basic building blocks of childhood into spectacular works of architecture and engineering, in hopes of winning glory, prize money, and a big ol’ Lego trophy. They can’t churn out the episodes fast enough for us. The U.S. has a version hosted by Will Arnett, which we also watch, but our family finds him a bit … over-the-top. We much prefer the Australian edition, hosted by the comedian Hamish Blake and judged by “Brickman,” a.k.a. Lego Certified Professional Ryan McNaught, both of whom exude genuine delight and affection for the contestants. McNaught has teared up during critiques of builds, whether gobsmacked by their beauty or moved by the tremendous effort put forth by the builders. It’s a show about teamwork, ingenuity, artistry, hilarity, physics, stamina, and grit—with a side helping of male vulnerability. [Related: Solving a museum’s bug problem with Legos]

A poem that I return to: “Joint Custody,” by Ada Limón. My family is living this. Limón, recalling a childhood of being “taken /  back and forth on Sundays,” of shifting between “two different / kitchen tables, two sets of rules,” reassures me that even though this is sometimes “not easy,” my kids will be okay—more than okay—as long as they know they are “loved each place.” That beautiful wisdom guides my every step with them.

Something I recently rewatched: My mom died when my son was 2 and my daughter didn’t yet exist, and each year around this time—my mom’s birthday—I find little ways to celebrate her by sharing with my kids the things she loved. Chocolate was a big one, I Love Lucy another. So on a recent weekend, we snuggled up and watched Lucille Ball stuffing bonbons down the front of her shirt, and laughed and laughed and laughed. And then we raided a box of truffles.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How the Ivy League broke America The secret to thinking your way out of anxiety How one woman became the scapegoat for America’s reading crisis

The Week Ahead

Gladiator II, an action film starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who becomes a gladiator and seeks to save Rome from tyrannical leaders (in theaters Friday) Dune: Prophecy, a spin-off prequel series about the establishment of the Bene Gesserit (premieres today on HBO and Max) An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel by Anna Moschovakis about an unnamed protagonist who attempts to find—and eliminate—her housemate, who was lost after a major earthquake (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Raisa Álava

What the Band Eats

By Reya Hart

I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle … Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.

But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.

Read the full article.

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