'Brink of War' Movie Pits Reagan Against Gorbachev
Jeff Daniels leads a gripping Cold War drama that turns tense diplomatic talks into a surprisingly emotional and mesmerizing film. In theatres now.
Arts & Music
The Brink of War | ★★★★☆ 4 out of 5 stars
A Highline Journal Exclusive Movie Review by Daniel Magill
If you were alive during the Cold War – and especially the 1980s – you lived through one of the most tense periods in American and global history. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were aimed at the United States and the Soviet Union. If any one of them went off, it could have ended everything.
This is the backdrop for the new film The Brink of War, from Angel Studios.
The story focuses on a single moment of the Cold War, a weekend meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, in Iceland of all places. It was the first meeting between the two men, and neither knew if they could trust the other, or even had a clear idea of what the other wanted.
Brink of War is aptly titled, because as nuclear proliferation accelerated in the decades leading up to this meeting, so did the very real threat of total global annihilation. Had this meeting failed badly, it’s hard to say what might have happened next.
The movie captures all this tension and history exceptionally well.
And for those who are a bit too young to have lived through this as an adult – such as me – the movie gives enough context so that we understand what’s at stake and what each nation’s leader is trying to accomplish.
The ever-versatile Jeff Daniels gives a terrific performance as Reagan, headlining a cast of lesser known actors, along with the always great J.K. Simmons as Secretary of State George Schultz. Every performer rises to the occasion and effectively conveys the mistrust, dislike, and outright hostility felt at that time between these two enemy nations.
A script like this is tough to deliver, because all the tension, plot, and character is mostly revealed through dialogue. It’s a movie about talking. But because what they’re talking about could lead to the destruction of the world – these are important words!
Being mostly talking, the pace nevertheless moves briskly and never gets too slow. Breaks from the intense dialogue and negotiations are given as we also spend time with the spouses of the two leaders, and with the press corps hoping something, anything, might happen worth reporting about. We also get some great humor from the CIA and KGB agents who are forced to share a room for all their monitoring equipment during the meeting.
Those scenes, while not critical to the plot, never become more of the focus than they need to be. But they do help provide a fuller picture of what it might have been like to be in Iceland over those two days. And it’s fascinating to watch these two powerful women support their husbands in different ways.
The script focuses on key details – such as a famous Russian cellist who turned out to be a major factor in the negotiations – that provide a practical humanity for what’s really at stake. It’s not just the nuclear weapons. It’s the lives of all the people living without freedom.
The cellist’s music makes up part of what turns out to be a surprisingly powerful film score. And the dramatic ending is well-earned and packs an emotional punch. You really feel it when Reagan finally finds an inroad into the Russian wall that had stymied him and every other American president since Eisenhower.
Freedom is at hand. It’s hard to win, and hard to keep. And while war was never inevitable in this case, it’s always been easier to blow things up than to talk with your adversary to prevent that from happening.
This is a film about one of the few such talks in history. And it’s mesmerizing to watch it unfold.
Daniel Magill is the published author of the Readers Favorite 5-star sci-fi time travel thriller Future In Doubt and the galactic War Virus series. He lives in Burien with his wife and kids.
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