[yasr_overall_rating]
A look at John Hinckley’s 1981 assassination attempt against U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
I was only nine years old when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 but I was still old enough to remember that it dominated the news for a very long time. And this was in Dublin, Ireland. It was worldwide, and everybody held their breaths as President Reagan underwent surgery to have shrapnel from a bullet removed from his chest. While John Hinckley didn’t physically shoot Reagan, he did shoot police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and critically wounded Press Secretary James Brady, and it was during this shootout that a bullet ricocheted off the limousine that President Reagan was attempting to enter and was lodged in his chest. Initially, nobody thought Reagan was shot, including himself, it was only after the Secret Service managed to drive Mr. Reagan away from the crime scene, that they realized he had been wounded.
“Killing Reagan” puts more emphasis on John Hinckley and his unhealthy obsessive fixation with Actress Jodie Foster and what makes him tick, and while there is significant weight afforded to the Reagans and their win over Jimmy Carter, their appearance throughout the show feels more like a filmmaking tactic so that the producers could account for a dual timeline, showing us what was going on not only in Hinckley’s life and in his head, but also allowing us to see what the Reagans were doing simultaneously, leading up to the aforementioned shooting. Granted, you can’t title a film “Killing Reagan” and not have the Reagans in it but it feels more like Hinckley’s story than it does Reagan’s.
We are introduced to John Hinckley early on while he is standing in amongst a crowd, waiting for President Jimmy Carter to arrive. He has a gun in his pocket and as the President’s limousine approaches, he slowly removes it but when a Secret Service agent notices him acting strangely and begins to advance towards him, Hinckley panics and leaves the scene. His obsession with actress Jodie Foster began with her appearance as a teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and throughout the film, he constantly tries to initiate contact with her, calling her apartment while she studied at Yale University. When this approach fails, as does sending her love letters, he feels the only way he can get her attention, is to copy the motives of the fictional character of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) from “Taxi Driver,” where he plotted to assassinate a presidential candidate. Shooting President Reagan was not politically motivated, it was the actions of a lone, deranged, psychotic individual, wanting to impress an actress he thought would feel the same way about him once he completed his objective.
Tim Matheson has long been a favorite actor of mine, with appearances in the comedies “Animal House,” “1941,” “A Little Sex,” and “Up the Creek,” to more serious fare such as “Impulse,” “Buried Alive,” and his appearance on “The West Wing,” he is that rare actor that embodies both strong comedic and dramatic abilities, allowing us to either love him or hate him. As Reagan, thankfully, he does not resort to mimicry, instead, he plays the man as the world came to know him, genuine, sincere, with some emphasis placed on Reagan’s mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. Cynthia Nixon as Nancy Reagan is fine, unyielding in her support for her husband but occasionally having to take a hard line approach with her husband’s personnel and some of his diplomatic decisions. Overall, “Killing Reagan” doesn’t add anything new to a moment in time we are all familiar with and which can easily be looked up online via Google or Wikipedia, but in watching the film recreate many aspects of both Reagan’s and Hinckley’s lives, and how they both unfortunately collided, it gives a new perspective, one worth checking out.
Available on DVD Tuesday, February 7th
