Warren Beatty (1981)

Reds is epic in length (three-and-a-quarter hours) and ambition, but not in substance.   The story of John Reed, the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and his wife Louise Bryant works well as a love story but Warren Beatty, who also produced, starred as Reed and co-wrote the screenplay with Trevor Griffiths, aimed for much more.   A mainstream Hollywood picture chronicling the history of left-wing political movements in America in the second decade of the twentieth century was an improbable project thirty years ago; since the idea seems incredible now, Reds is all the more likeable in retrospect.  But this is a chronicle in the nearly pejorative sense of an extended narrative record that lacks an interpretative underpinning – the underpinning which is needed to animate, and make dramatic, historical reconstructions.   There are many sequences, in America and Russia, of angry exchanges between rival factions and individuals at rallies and in committee rooms.   They’re well staged and the acting has a vigorous naturalism but the sound and fury don’t mean a lot because the characters aren’t developed, except for Reed himself.  Even he, although he has plenty of political things to say, doesn’t engage us in these passages in the way that he does when he’s arguing with Louise.   Beatty probably wanted – with good reason – to get away from both the declamatory excesses of the Hollywood historical epic and its clumsy attempts to convey historical moment through supposedly natural conversation (the pleased-to-meet-you-Lenin-my-name’s-Trotsky school of screenwriting).  As a result, though, he loses any sense that political urgency and seriousness were as natural as breathing to the likes of John Reed.   Jerzy Kozinski, as Zinoviev, gets that quality across but the character is underwritten.  The only satisfying combination of individual personality and political animal is Maureen Stapleton’s Emma Goldman:  Stapleton makes you believe in a woman who, even at her most conversational, couldn’t stop making speeches

Beatty’s attempts to get away from the old way of historical-political storytelling on screen gradually run out of steam.  Once the action switches largely to Russia, at the time and in the aftermath of the Revolution, Reds ­– although it’s always visually interesting – becomes a conventional, even clichéd narrative.  Entering its last hour, the film looks to have suffered a terminal loss of momentum, although it recovers eventually.  The drama of whether the ailing Reed and the gallant Louise, who stows away on a ship from New York to Europe and seems to traverse Eurasia in search of her husband, is involving – but in the way that the Yuri-Lara love story in Doctor Zhivago is involving (that is, without the political or moral passions of the pair counting for much).   There are many good actors in Reds but all except Stapleton are upstaged by the amazing cast of real-life witnesses whom Beatty interviewed, over a period of several years, and whose recollections of Reed, Bryant and their circle punctuate and eclipse the bulk of the movie.  The thirty-two witnesses include Oleg Kerensky, Henry Miller, Adela Rogers St John and, best of all, a double act of Dora Russell and Rebecca West.  All these people are dead now (as, of course, is Maureen Stapleton):  capturing them in vivid, lucid old age on film is the lasting achievement of Reds.

Warren Beatty’s acting is highly intelligent and sensitive although his hagiographic attitude towards Reed makes him too gentlemanly:  Beatty is terrific when he allows Reed to be annoying but he often holds back from this.   Diane Keaton’s speech rhythms often sound anachronistic and she may be more fundamentally miscast as Louise Bryant, whose qualities, by all accounts, didn’t include a great sense of humour.  Still, Keaton’s humour is very welcome and she does some great things – she has in this role a tense, deliberate walk that gets her inside the mind and body of a woman who seems to have been congenitally angry and desperately self-assertive.   Although the moment on a Russian station when Louise is desperately hoping to see Reed step down from the train is obviously conceived, Diane Keaton’s quicksilver emotionality transcends the obviousness and makes the scene very affecting.  (She’s very good too in the final scene in the hospital, where Reed dies.) Eugene O’Neill is an unusual role for Jack Nicholson and he gives a thoughtful performance yet it comes over, I assume inadvertently, as disrespectful to the man he’s playing:  Nicholson gets the most out of the lethally hurtful lines he’s asked to deliver but doesn’t suggest any depth to O’Neill.  (Academy Awards for Best Director, Supporting Actress (Stapleton) and Cinematography (Vittorio Storaro); in spite of its considerable limitations, Reds would have been a much more deserving recipient of the Best Picture prize than that year’s ludicrous winner Chariots of Fire.)

11 July 2010