Talky Cold War Reagan Drama

Writer-director Michael Russell Gunn’s well-meaning feature film debut, The Brink of War, takes a wordy, academic approach to chronicling the two momentous days in October 1986 when US President Ronald Reagan (Jeff Daniels) and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris) sat across a table in a house in Reykjavik, Iceland hoping to strike a landmark nuclear disarmament deal designed to keep the Cold War from finally turning into a hot one. (Impressively, the film was shot at the actual location and in the same rooms where the leaders spoke.)

As thoughtful and earnest as the drama is, it’s also pretty chill for a movie about trying to prevent nuclear war. The events may take place at the peak of the Cold War, and the movie reiterates that this meeting is the last chance for such a deal to happen, but The Brink of War lacks the urgency that any film about, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis (e.g., Thirteen Days) possesses, where the viewer truly feels the global stakes and intense pressure the President is under.

The Brink of War is very stagebound, often feeling like a play adapted for the screen, but it is just as reminiscent of those solid, actor-driven HBO films of the 1990s that dutifully covered biographical or then-topical subjects. (Angel Studios’ other recent Presidential pic, Young Washington, at least offered cinemagoers some flintlock-firin’, tomahawk-throwin’ action scenes to keep it from feeling like TV movie fare.) Still, if this was made as an HBO movie in the ‘90s, it probably would’ve won an Emmy or two.

The Brink of War is most alive whenever Reagan and Gorbachev are negotiating one on one, challenging each other’s positions and calling out each country’s hypocrisies. Things get heated between them — as issues ranging from human rights, religion, and the US’s Strategic Defense Initiative are raised — with each leader standing their political and philosophical ground. These are two men trying to find a way to connect with one another, each knowing this is their chance to make history and accomplish something great and lasting. But they each possess their fair share of pride, stubbornness and mistrust.

Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris solidly handle the material as if they were onstage together in a two-hander, their characters each probing the other for weakness or advantage. Daniels doesn’t quite capture the specificities of Reagan’s voice and mannerisms, but he ably conveys the 40th President’s convictions.

The closest the film comes to trying to get to explore Reagan as a human being is seeing him still troubled, physically and mentally, from an assassination attempt a few years earlier. While not outright hagiography, The Brink of War is not out to paint the Gipper in a critical light. This film is pro-American values even as, in the moments where Gorbachev goes off on Reagan, it acknowledges the US’s flaws.

Harris is even better as Gorbachev, his standout scene being where he castigates the US policy that prevents farming and cow-milking equipment to be sold to the Soviet Union so they could feed their children. This Gorbachev isn’t pro-West but he understands the USSR needs to change. He hopes this nuclear deal — a risky, almost fantastical proposition for either ruler to try to sell to various factions back home — will give him the political capital needed to mold the USSR in his vision even as he suspects his own KGB is spying on him at this event.

The film’s most successful and amusing subplot involves the gamesmanship between First Lady Nancy Reagan (Hope Davis) and Raisa Gorbacheva (standout Branka Katić). Nancy didn’t go to Iceland but Raisa did, and she uses the press to throw shade at her US counterpart. What results is a passive-aggressive proxy war where each savvily uses the media to knock the other. It’s all very deliciously petty.

This subplot, however, also involves a kinda sorta ongoing flirtation between two reporters (Aya Cash and Guy Burnet) that doesn’t really go anywhere and left me wanting the movie to get back to the more pressing matters at hand.

Able support is provided throughout by J.K. Simmons as US Secretary of State George Schultz, to whom the film is dedicated. At this point, the Oscar winner can play Badass Bald Man in Charge in his sleep, but he nevertheless provides Daniels’ Reagan with someone else to open up to besides Nancy. The end of The Brink of War, though, doesn’t help make it not feel like a filmed play by abruptly having Schultz break the fourth wall to explain the outcome of the summit just as a character might on stage.

Forty years later, it’s amazing to see a depiction of US and Russian leaders engaged in thoughtful dialogue. It’s impossible to divorce this period piece from current events or to take politics out of it. The biggest takeaway from The Brink of War is how vital it is for world leaders, even foes, to be intelligent in their approach to vital issues facing their peoples and empathetic enough to acknowledge their shared humanity.