Viva ‘Reds’! Warren Beatty’s Masterful Film

Diane Keaton, as Louise Bryant, shows an uncanny ability to express vulnerability when she’s being aggressive and belligerent. Indeed, her outbursts are usually signs that she’s been cut to the quick. Bryant constantly challenges herself to experiences and achievements that do not come easily to her personality. Her biggest test is Eugene O’Neill. Their affair exposes her ambivalence about romantic commitment.

O’Neill, played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson, functions as Bohemia’s devil’s advocate. He’s in rebellion against all orthodoxies, whether “reactionary” or “progressive.” And if his own view of human possibilities is limited, he does have the cleansing honesty that makes real progress possible. Nicholson looks relieved at having sharp, astringent dialogue for a change; he doesn’t seem as hyped for a “big” performance as he did in The Shining and The Postman Always Rings Twice. He’s relaxed and slithery, a charming serpent to Louise Bryant’s brave-new-world Eve.

Working with Beatty must make actors (and nonactors like George Plimpton) deliriously happy. Keaton convinces us, as she never has before, that she can play a woman of backbone, and Beatty’s self-effacement is itself almost an act of love. In a cameo as a hard-nosed editor, Gene Hackman stops the show with his joyous, barking bonhomie. Others, like Edward Herrmann’s Max Eastman and Max Wright’s Floyd Dell, register mostly as mysteriously “right” presences, as they might in a good Altman film. Plimpton, as a lecherous magazine editor, carries on with a faintly sepulchral wryness, like the Ghost of Café Society Past.

It’s when the Utopian revolution turns ugly that Reds‘ themes come into focus. The Soviets strive to effect massive change through force of will alone. Shackling together disparate countries in chaotic Comintern committees, forsaking the immediate needs of the people to shore up the State, their liberations turn to tyranny. But as the revolution of the Soviets breaks down, the revolution of Jack and Louise’s relationship — their attempt to be a marriage of equals — finally comes to fruition. At the end, they’re comrades.

It’s not incidental to the politics of the film that John Reed and Louise Bryant are American journalists. Free speech and the right to dissent are at the heart of this movie. In this century, social change in America hasn’t happened because oppressed people altered the means of production, but because they manipulated the means of communication. This movie articulates the search for social progress when most of the nation is hiding behind patriotic platitudes. In this context, Reds might even be called a revolutionary film.