Reds
Warren Beatty’s “Reds” has been on my radar for a while, mainly because Beatty won Best Director of Steven Spielberg when he was nominated for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Like “Ordinary People,” it’s a film I’ve had biases against because of what they did at the Oscars sight unseen. In the past few months, I’ve finally watched both (nudged towards doing so courtesy the ’80s All Over podcast), and my biases have dissipated because the movies, though still not as good, in my opinion, as what they won over, are pretty damn great. It probably helps that they speak a lot to who I am now as a person more than they would have, say, 20 years ago.
“Reds” feels very relevant to the political climate in America now, not necessarily in terms of what John Reed, the character whose life Beatty is bringing to the screen, believes in (although there are shades of relevance), but in how the branches of the same tree can be broken apart when it comes to jockeying for position. In modern liberalism in America, the 2016 election cycle fractured the party into center-left and far left, and it’s understandable why it happened given the reputations of the two people vying for the Democratic nomination. The wounds opened up during the primary never healed, and so, rather than a united front, the two are divided among one another; fundamentally, we have the same goals, but it’s how we go about accomplishing them that we differ. Purity tests are a big part of the process, and if you fail, you’re an enemy of the “true” party. The first half of “Reds” is prologue to this moment in Beatty’s film, and when it got here, I might as well have been following social media and the news about the present day, it felt so palpable to some of what’s going on now.
I do not doubt that Beatty feels a kinship to Reed, the writer and political activist whose book on the 1917 Russian Revolution, 10 Days That Shook the World, was a landmark piece of writing about one of the most significant political moments of the 20th Century, but I don’t think that’s the only reason Beatty devoted about a decade to bringing Reed’s story to the screen. A 3 1/4 hour drama on a socialist sounds like it would be a snooze (which is another part of why I think I waited so long to watch it), but Beatty and his co-writer, Trevor Griffiths, understand that, if you’re going to go as big and broad and epic with this story as you want to, you have to make it absorbing on a personal level that draws people in, and that’s where Reed’s life being told through his relationship with feminist writer Louise Bryant is important. Bryant has a big part to play in this story and this point in Reed’s life, but she also anchors the film emotionally while Reed plays radical icon. It’s fascinating to think of this and Beatty’s 1998 political satire, “Bulworth,” on the same spectrum of political thought, because while they could not be any more different in how they attack political stories and ideas about politics, they are very much from a mind who knows where he stands, and is capable of bringing his voice to the conversation in a variety of ways that get his point across. Ironically, the one thing neither Reed nor Bryant can do in “Reds,” and how they evolve as thinkers in the film is one of the most fascinating aspects of it.
Point-of-view is an important part of “Reds,” and Beatty lets a lot of different ones in. There’s Reed, who is a radical in the romantic sense; he loves the idea of revolutionary change sweeping in and the promised land that can offer, but, as he will find out in the second half of the film, he doesn’t have the stomach for the bureaucracy that is necessary to enact said changes. I love Beatty’s work in this film, and the passion and energy and highs and lows Reed goes through in this film are seen in every moment of his performance. There’s Bryant, who is her own type of idealist at the beginning in terms of her writing voice; she wants to be one thing, but she hasn’t yet figured out what that is, and it shows in her writing. Bryant is played by Diane Keaton and her performance is fantastic as she carves out an important place in this story alongside Beatty’s Reed, while also servicing as a romantic lead, and it may be one of my very favorite performances of hers. The next most important character in the film is Eugene O’Neil, the playwright who comes to know Reed and Bryant, and actually begins an affair with Louise as Reed is covering the 1916 political conventions that causes friction even after Reed and Bryant get married. O’Neil is played by Jack Nicholson, and it is vintage, iconic Jack, and honestly, I don’t know how much more needs to be said than that. There are plenty of other actors who bring their A-game to the movie in smaller roles (like Maureen Stapleton as Emma Goldman, Gene Hackman as Pete Van Wherry and Paul Sorvino as Louis Fraina), but beyond Beatty, Keaton and Nicholson there’s little doubt that the next most memorable points-of-view that Beatty layers in to the film as people known simply as “The Witnesses.” These are people who were alive at the moments that Beatty is portraying, and important people in the history of socialism and unions and politics in the United States, and what they say adds context to Reed and Bryant’s life together and what they are experiencing. It’s a bold strategy that gives the film a deeper sense of purpose and interest than if it were just a straight-line narrative, and it is an inspired way for Beatty to tell this story and make it entertaining and enlightening at the run time. There’s layers upon layers of interest to the political climate being portrayed, and Beatty finds a way of bringing it to life to us that allows us to understand what a huge directorial accomplishment the film is.
I’m so grateful to have finally taken the leap with “Reds.” The scope of John Reed’s story is thrilling to watch through Vitorrio Storaro’s cinematography, especially during Beatty’s staging of the Russian Revolution, as Reed and Bryant find themselves smack dab in the middle of history, and are strangers in a strange land trying to bring the story to the masses. It is a thrilling moment at the center of a movie with plenty of them, whether it’s a scene between Bryan and O’Neil as Eugene tells her why he’s right for her and John isn’t, or a moment where Reed is trying to get his voice heard among the Bolsheviks in Russia after the revolution, or when Bryant is trying to find her place among Reed’s inner circle at the beginning, “Reds” sees intimate personal moments as important to the larger story it’s telling, and it makes for great cinema. “Reds” endures because Beatty found a fresh way to tell a passionate personal story on a large stage, and it is something that resonates whether you agree with the politics of John Reed or not. It’s not really about advocating for a person’s politics, but showing how complicated the political world can be, and it’s a marvel of intelligent filmmaking.
