He Was One of Our Greatest Movie Stars. Now He’s Making Right-Wing Propaganda. What Happened?

Dennis Quaid anchors Reagan, the new biopic of his favorite president, in exactly the same way concrete boots anchor a mob witness thrown into the Gowanus Canal. The conventions of biopic acting—the vocal impersonation, the weird prosthetics, the CGI de-aging—make Quaid’s work into a series of mannerisms. He looks uncertain throughout, working so hard that the work is all that’s visible. Quaid isn’t helped by the movie he’s in, even though it was his passion project. Most of what you need to know about it can be surmised by its framing device: In present-day Russia, a young up-and-comer in the government secretly goes to see a retired KGB agent played, with “moose and squirrel” accent, by Jon Voight. Why is he there? To learn from the past, specifically about Ronald Reagan, with whom our ancient spy is obsessed, and who apparently won the Cold War near single-handedly. What follows is like a biopic of Batman if it were narrated and shot by the Joker. Setups and payoffs occur seemingly at random. A score made up entirely of stakes-goosing stings deploys tense strings every three to five minutes. The film jumps around so much in time it feels structured via the cut-up technique. It is hamstrung, both by the abilities of director Sean McNamara (3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain) and by its twin directives: making an inspirational Reagan hagiography for conservative (and, given its hints that Reagan was chosen by God, Christian) audiences and remaking Reagan for the age of Trump. Thus, Reagan speechwriter and Trump ally Dana Rohrabacher is given almost coequal credit for bringing down the Evil Empire, while George H.W. Bush, who actually oversaw and managed the end of the Cold War during his subsequent presidency, appears in one scene and has only a line or two.

The film’s treatment of any number of subjects—from Reagan’s divorce from his first wife, to the Black Friday clashes between Hollywood unions, to its portrayal of Dalton Trumbo as a lisping queen, to its depiction of all 1960s protesters as communist stooges—is drawn from the fever swamp of right-wing publishing. The movie is so dedicated to mythmaking it can’t even keep all its stories straight. It tries to push the myth that Reagan backed the “Star Wars” missile-defense system as a trick to get the USSR to overspend itself into oblivion, then simultaneously dramatizes Reagan offering to partner with the Soviets on Star Wars and share all of its technology with them in the hopes of making nuclear weapons obsolete. Every domestic problem, from the AIDS crisis to the Iran–Contra affair, is treated as a distraction from Reagan’s God-given task of destroying the Soviet Union. By the time a schmaltz-infused rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” plays over footage of a mentally addled Gipper riding off into the sunset, it seems as if what we’ve watched is less a movie than an Arthurian legend for a new era, absent the bawdiness, violence, and deeply flawed characters that make Arthurian legends so enduring.

Bad movies are very common in Dennis Quaid’s filmography, particularly recently, as he’s turned to making more and more “faith-based” films, but it is rare for him to actually give a bad performance. When you write a great deal about acting, a question like “Is there a good actor with as terrible a filmography as Dennis Quaid?” is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night. When I’ve posed this question to friends over the years, some doubt my assertion that Quaid is a good actor, others that his filmography is uniquely bad, but I think any honest examination of his work will lead to the same conclusion.

Let’s start with the filmography. He’s had 116 roles, according to the IMDb, with very, very few high points. In stark contrast to other prolific actors like Nicolas Cage, Quaid hasn’t led a classic or important film, and he’s made a lot of terrible ones. Perhaps you might remember The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s climate-change disaster film in which Jake Gyllenhaal outruns poorly rendered CGI wolves, or Legion, in which a group of strangers stranded in a diner join forces with the fallen angel Michael (Paul Bettany) to fight an army of demons sent by God to destroy humanity. (Actually, maybe you don’t remember that last one.) Then there’s Peter Farrelly’s anthology boondoggle Movie 43, and woebegone remakes of D.O.A. and Footloose. Many of his films don’t even have the decency to be worth hate-watching and instead, like The Long Riders and Wyatt Earp, are merely boring. Yet he is almost always good in these films. Often, he’s the best thing about them. In The Day After Tomorrow, he undergirds Jack Hall, the sad dad and prophetic scientist, with real vulnerability and need. His performance as the tubercular Doc Holliday in Wyatt Earp, which required a physical transformation so severe that Quaid suffered from anorexia as a result, is electrifying in its death-soaked charisma. Unfortunately for Quaid, his scene partner for much of the film is Kevin Costner, whose performance is so monotonous as to seem borderline comatose.

It’s a lot to ask someone to sit through a bad movie for a good performance, however. If we want to see how good Quaid can be without hating ourselves by the end of the film, perhaps we should look instead at his few good movies, particularly his breakthrough film Breaking Away. Directed by Peter Yates, Breaking Away is a minor coming-of-age classic, a town-vs.-gown dramedy in which the locals of Bloomington wage war on the students of Indiana University and confront the limitations of their own lives. Quaid plays Mike, a former high school football star who is facing the prospect of being a has-been at the age of 19. Mike isn’t the film’s main character—that would be Dennis Christopher’s Dave Stohler, an avid cyclist who desperately wants to be Italian—but he’s responsible for providing the story with its darker undertones. As the ringleader of his band of losers, Mike is filled with despair that finds expression in sardonic humor, rage, and the occasional fistfight. He’s so stuck in place that even when presented with the opportunity to make something of himself in the film’s climactic bicycle race, he at first demurs out of belief that nothing he does will matter. Quaid brings to the role an impossible-to-resist magnetism, wielding what would become his trademark wide grin to endear us to a character who on paper would be hard to like.

Had Breaking Away been made eight years earlier, Quaid might have been able to follow up the film’s success with interesting roles in movies made by great directors, because those were the kinds of movies being made in the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. This is the luck that befell Quaid’s older brother Randy, who managed to make great movies with Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon), Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Bound for Glory), and Arthur Penn (the underrated revisionist Western The Missouri Breaks) before churning out decades of dreck. Had Dennis been born 10 years before Randy, he could’ve had something akin to the career of Harrison Ford, parlaying his easy appeal and good looks into several decades as an iconic leading man. Instead, Quaid, like his co-stars Christopher, Jackie Earle Haley, and Daniel Stern, fell into the odd microgeneration between New Hollywood and the Brat Pack, stranded in a studio system rapidly running out of ideas.

Quaid managed to make another minor classic during this period, 1983’s The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman. The film, originally a box-office flop, now beloved and influential, chronicles the true story of the first Americans in space. Quaid is again not the film’s focus; instead, he plays Gordon Cooper, an Air Force test pilot whose nickname (Hot Dog) tells you an awful lot about him. Hot Dog is filled with the same yearnings, ambitions, and rage as Mike from Breaking Away. The role is a bit of a layup, but Quaid brings to it an intensity and verve that set a template for future military hotshot blockbusters like Top Gun. The one weakness in his performance is a tendency to drift into gestures and line deliveries copied from Jack Nicholson, in much the same way that James Dean frequently aped Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. It makes sense that Nicholson would be Quaid’s model—their trademark smiles are nearly identical, and Nicholson was also an early mentor to Quaid while the former made The Missouri Breaks with Quaid’s brother. “My very first movie set, I’m watching these actors, my real heroes,” Quaid once told E! News. “We hung out at Jack Nicholson’s house every night. They gave me a lot of encouragement.” (Later, Quaid would name his first son after his idol.)

After The Right Stuff, Quaid began racking up leading roles. He starred in thrillers both legal (Suspect, opposite Cher) and erotic (The Big Easy, in which Quaid serves up perhaps the most bonkers dialect work of all time), and in the three sci-fi films I watched over and over again as a child: Dreamscape, Enemy Mine, and Innerspace. The latter, which co-starred Martin Short and Meg Ryan, remains surprisingly charming. In it, Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton, a down-on-his-luck Air Force test pilot—a winking reference to The Right Stuff—who is shrunk down to the size of a drop of water in an experimental craft, then accidentally injected into the ass of Jack Putter, a neurotic grocery clerk played by Short. Both men are soon on the run from international arms traffickers and in love with the same woman, Lydia (played by Ryan, Quaid’s future wife).

The story doesn’t make a ton of sense, but the film has panache to spare. Instead of condescending to the material, everyone involved commits. Director Joe Dante brings his characteristic mix of horror, comedy, and humanism, and all three leads have incredible chemistry with each other. It is only in rewatching it recently with my own child that I realized that this chemistry is all the more miraculous given that Martin Short and Dennis Quaid are on-screen together for only a few minutes at the very end. The magic trick of the film is convincing you that Quaid and Short are in scenes together even though Quaid is on a different set entirely from his co-stars. Seated in Jack’s molecule-sized death trap, Quaid also has to undergo an entire arc from binge-drinking egomaniac to responsible father-to-be in a 24-hour period and somehow make it all seem plausible.

Innerspace is the film people almost always mention when I bring up Quaid’s oeuvre, and it was so beloved by James Lipton that he couldn’t resist asking Quaid, Ryan, and Short about it in their respective episodes of Inside the Actors Studio. The movie is quite enjoyable, but the reason why it always comes up may be that it is one of perhaps three movies starring Quaid that is good. The other two are polar opposites: the family drama The Rookie and the hard-R cowboy-gothic thriller Flesh and Bone. The Rookie is a sentimental, sun-dappled story of a man who, in early middle age, makes a long-shot attempt to pitch in Major League Baseball. The Disney film, which sanitizes its true story into a family-friendly G rating, would not work were it not for Quaid’s world-weary turn as Jim Morris. He eschews the kind of big, star-centered performance he could have given and instead embodies Jim Morris as a real man with real struggles, working his ass off to make his dream come true. Yes, we get his trademark smile, but he—and we—have to work to earn it.

Quaid doesn’t flash that smile once in Flesh and Bone. Instead, he plays the damaged Arlis Sweeney, a drifter who stocks vending machines in rural Texas. Arlis is a decaying isotope of a man, the leftovers of a childhood spent aiding his criminal father Roy (James Caan) and, as a result, being party to a horrible crime. He cannot let himself grow attached to anyone, to feel love or even simple happiness. Until, of course, he falls in love with Meg Ryan’s Kay at the exact moment that his father comes back into his life. The film is a hidden gem in Quaid’s body of work, one in which he plays the opposite of hot dogs like Tuck Pendleton and Gordon Cooper. Instead of being verbose and wild, he’s taciturn and controlled. Instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve, he keeps everything inside. Instead of ambition, he has stasis. The entire film plays out on Quaid’s face, and he lets us see every thought that Arlis refuses to express.

Alongside this, however, Quaid has done stellar work in supporting roles. He’s excellent in Far From Heaven, Postcards From the Edge, and Traffic. Even during the past 15 years, when he’s stuffed himself into such inspirational turkeys as On a Wing and a Prayer and Blue Miracle, he’s also delivered hilarious comic turns in TV shows like Drunk History, Workaholics, and Inside Amy Schumer. Later this month, he will again appear in a small role, this time in the satirical body-horror film The Substance, playing an id-driven ogre of a TV executive named, unsubtly, Harvey. Quaid’s performance in The Substance is so over the top it breaks the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. But it is, again, exactly the right style of performance for the film.

It’s that sense of genre that makes Quaid such a good actor. Put him in a blockbuster as a cardboard-cutout dad devoted to finding his kids, and he’ll make him believable. Want him to play a psychic who solves people’s issues by going into their dreams? As Dreamscape proved, he can do that too. He can be the divorced dad in a wholesome kids movie like The Parent Trap or the uptight reverend in your remake of Footloose. Whether playing a whitewashed portrait of the president who brought the religious right to power or a gluttonous sleazebag TV mogul who bears more than a passing resemblance to the real-life candidate Quaid has endorsed, he adapts himself to the project, never signaling to the audience that he thinks the work is beneath him. The vast gulf between his dedication and his judgment has resulted in a remarkably varied body of work, one that has very few good movies but even fewer bad performances.

Perhaps this is why I like Quaid so much, even if getting to enjoy his acting means watching films that make me want to die: He does the work. That is the job of most actors—the lucky ones who get to work, anyway—to do a good job day in and day out, regardless of the project. That is what it means to be a professional, rather than a star. A professional spends their life working in a largely interpretive art form in an industry that rarely grants them much control over the final product. Few of them win awards. Many of them, like Quaid, wind up in a lot of crap. But there is beauty to be found in the work of artists who always show up, even, or maybe especially, when the project doesn’t deserve it.