Reds

This movie was great, and I hope it comes out on DVD real soon. Beatty became Reed in more than one sense--not only did he act the part, but he directed the movie in a way reminiscent of the kind of "new journalistic" style that Reed and his fellow MASSES writers pioneered, mixing the drama with interviews of people who knew JR, Louise, etc.

The film also sort of puts forward the question, "What if, instead of running back to Russia (to die of kidney failure and mistreatment by the CP), Jack Reed had stayed in this country to build the CP? Would it have turned out to become Stalinist?" According to Howe and Coser, who wrote a good book on THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, much like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Reed was the ONLY leader who was independent, who had some real backbone.

The best part of the movie is when Emma Goldmann, played by Maureen Stapleton, tells Jack that "it doesn't work" (i.e. statist, bureaucratic socialism that the Bolsheviks were instituting as a grossly mistaken response to the economic crisis and Allied invasion of Russia after the Revolution). And then his rebellion against the lying propaganda of Zinoviev. Kind of hits me right now that Jerzy Kosinski should play Zinoviev--didn't he commit suicide when he was exposed as a plagiarist? Where is the line between art and reality, politics and life?

Of course I loved the romantic reality between Beatty, Bryant, and Nicholson (Reed, Bryant, and Eugene O'Neill). And the cynicism that Reed expresses about the Democrats and Wilson is certainly apropos today.

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I am old enough to have lived through (probably) three different Americas. These are radically different worlds. It isn't just the mood, styles or state of the economy; its the adoption of a whole cosmology. Religions change under our feet. Family, love, belonging. These things are malleable yet largely beyond our control and we forget what "things were like." Memory always is constructed in terms of the present world.

Always.

So projects like this are necessary. We cannot know who we are unless we remind ourselves who we were.

The ordinary fold here is a romance, folded into grand political actions. Here they are a bit more cerebral than usual, but never getting past the notion of simple justice.

The more unusual and complex fold is that we see a story based on real events and people. Interspersed with that story are interviews of people who were personally involved in the story. These are remarkable, the way they are captured and the way they are edited to overlap with and annotate the story. But much more engaging is that these are enticing people, many with minds and phases that invite us into their faces — made warmer and more open by Beatty's camera. I compare this to the "Up" serious and the contrast is astonishing. True, here we want to be informed about the lives of others, and the "Up" goals pretend that the people randomly selected decades ago are remotely worth knowing.

But these folks are. We want more, simply based on their implicit invitation, and we carry ourselves into the narrative more forcefully, sort of like the characters do. This is folding doing its job and doing it well. They remember. I remember, and therefore am.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

"Reds" is a 200-minute epic masterpiece which deals with left-wing American journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty in an Oscar-nominated performance) and his coverage of the Russian Revolution of the 1910s. Beatty's passion is what carries this ambitious film, which could have easily been a multi-million dollar disaster. His Oscar-winning direction, screenplay, and overall performance carry the film as far as it can possibly go. The top-flight performances by Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson (both Oscar-nominated), and Maureen Stapleton (Oscar-winning) all add great depth to the performance. Paul Sorvino, Edward Herrmann, and Gene Hackman also make lasting impressions in supporting roles. Overall a great achievement all the way around. 5 stars out of 5.

An engrossing film about John Reed's love affair with Louise Bryant and his struggles in the midst of the Russian Revolution. There are great performances from Beatty, Keaton, Nicholson (excellent as Eugene O'Neill) and Stapelton in her Oscar winning performance as Emma Goldman. Beatty's precision and timing in the use of his camera in this picture is a superb achievement. There is a touch of David Lean in director Beatty in this film. The color, the editing, the sound. All of those important filmic elements are at play here in great form. Beatty won the Best Director Oscar, but lost the Best Picture award to Chariots of Fire.

"Reds" was Warren Beatty's ambitious passion project of 1981, the film that was supposed to clean up at the Oscars that year. The Academy ended up being fairly cool toward it, giving it only three awards out of 12 nominations, but it did finally recognize Beatty for his balls if nothing else by giving him the Best Director Oscar.

It's a good film that holds up well, even if it can be a bit dry at times. Beatty (Oscar nominated) is compelling as Communist revolutionary John Reed, who worked tirelessly to bring a Socialist revolution to America, but he's outshone in the acting department by Diane Keaton (also Oscar nominated), who gets a chance to shed her Woody Allen persona and prove what a good dramatic actress she could be. I could have done with less of the domestic squabbling that drags down the middle part of the film, and found the parts detailing the couple's experiences in Russia to be the most engrossing. The movie has a whopper of a running time (3 and a half hours) but even at the slower parts I never felt especially impatient with its length.

Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her fiery performance as Emma Goldman, and Vittorio Storaro won his second Oscar for cinematography (bookended by his work on "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Emperor"). The film's other nomination were for Best Picture, Best Actor (Beatty), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson, never especially convincing as playwright Eugene O'Neill), Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound. Alas, no nomination for Stephen Sondheim who provided the original score.

Incidentally, "Reds" became the 13th and last film to win Oscar nominations in all four acting categories until David O. Russell added back to back films number 14 and 15 with "Silver Linings Playbook" and "American Hustle." He's the only director to achieve that feat two years in a row.

Grade: A