Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 22-April-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Reds (1981)

If Warren Beatty ever did run for political office, his opponents would probably bring up the award-winning epic Reds as a means of questioning his patriotism and beliefs. Beatty co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this picture about American writers who supported the communist revolution in Russia and hoped for a similar upheaval at home. He would have a ready response in such a situation, though, for it can be argued that Reds is not bold propaganda and not entirely a historical account. In fact, it is first and foremost a love story, the details of which have been imagined.

The film includes interviews with people who actually knew its subjects in the nineteen-teens, but of course they can only remember certain rumors and published facts; the emotions behind them are anybody's guess. So Beatty goes ahead and guesses, to an extent, about the passions that united East Coast journalist John "Jack" Reed and an Oregon dentist's wife, Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), and sent them off on a tumultuous journey together. The story unfolds through Louise's eyes as an outsider who never fully breaks into her lover's world. (It would more properly be called "Red.") Abandoning her life in Portland, she moves to New York and lives in Jack's shadow, trying to establish herself as a reporter in her own right. Their relationship is repeatedly strained by professional envy and Jack's trips around the country following the swell of unionization and activism by the common laborer.

Their affair snags on the contrast between the radical goal of sexual freedom and the traditional need for security and devotion. Unwittingly, subconsciously, or perhaps deliberately, Louise obtains a proposal from Jack after dallying with poet and playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson, excellent). But their matrimonial life is as precarious as their bohemian one. Louise eventually leaves him, only to join him later on a trip to Russia that galvanizes them both. After becoming a party organizer back home, Jack returns to the emerging Soviet republic and gets commandeered into their machine. Trapped in a foreign country and rejected by his own, he spends months in various states of political imprisonment while Louise fights desperately to find him. Her quest is the stuff of high romance and is memorably depicted.

Yet for such a long and occasionally powerful movie, it's odd how Reds skims the surface of things without ever delving too deep. The struggles of the American communists, the foreign Bolsheviks, and the naively idealistic Reed might take a back seat to give the love story room, but the story itself is affecting without feeling personal. Louise and Jack's many arguments all share the same tone, cause, and outcome, and the viewer sees only enough of their insecurities to suspect that they were more frustrating and unpleasant in real life than the amiably confused Keaton and boyishly lovable Beatty . The passion which apparently wed these two people for better or worse must have been potent and may well have been forged by the extraordinary circumstances of their time. Reds, however, is an overview of their lives, too remote to partake of their heat.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.