I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.
Reds (1981) is a film about members of the radical chic, people who possess the fashionable affectation of left wing views, and Warren Beatty gets away with criticising their approach to philosophy while also romanticising an era in which public intellectuals could flourish. He ends up with too much on his plate as he tries to turn this into a romantic epic, the tale of an idealist having his views crushed, the story of the internal conflicts within a tight knit group of Communists and the saga of a woman going through a journey of self discovery.
The film really succeeds at focusing on some of these topics but falls short in others and that turns Reds into an uneven film. There were times when I was thoroughly engrossed and admired Beatty’s gutsiness in including lengthy scenes in which different characters simply engage in debates on a variety subjects. There were other times when I felt as though he was aiming for undeserved narrative sweep and over-stretching this story when it would have functioned better as a small scale study of a specific community.
The film concerns Communist journalist John “Jack” Reed, Warren Beatty, falls in love with uptight housewife Louise Bryant, Diane Keaton, who pursues her aspiration of becoming a feminist writer after leaving her husband for him. Bryant struggles to establish herself in Reed’s circles and becomes frustrated by his constant absences as he travels overseas to visit other communists and tries to establish a stronger movement in the United States. Her efforts to ingratiate herself with figures like Emma Goldman, Maureen Stapleton, are not successful. She has a passionate affair with playwright Eugene O’Neill, Jack Nicholson, when Reed is gone for a long period of time. When he returns the two reaffirm their love for one another and are married. When Russia becomes a Communist nation the two travel to the country full of optimism and hope but Bryant is disillusioned by the horrors she witnesses. Reed becomes a fervent supporter of the regime and becomes trapped in Russia, being imprisoned before being let go in order to unsuccessfully lobby for American interest in communism. Bryant journeys to Russia and reunites with Reed but he tragically dies a short time afterward.
This film flourishes when it is focusing on the supporting characters. Reed and Bryant are viewed through rose tinted glasses and Beatty seems to feel too much affection for the characters to really pick away at them. It almost feels like Beatty has crafted his own persona onto the character and can’t separate the two things. The parallels are clear as Reed is a gregarious womanizer with a successful career and a serious interest in liberal politics. Perhaps more importantly, Beatty was also an idealistic dreamer who wanted to mount massive productions that most mainstream studios didn’t want to touch. There were times when his skill did not match his ambition and he was unable to overcome obstacles that caused a film like Ishtar (1987) to fail. I don’t necessarily think that it was bad that Beatty was trying to comment on his own personality while also considering Reed’s life but he doesn’t provide us with enough self reflexivity. He turns Reed into a tragic hero with a few flaws that make him loveable and we always feel as though we are looking at him through glass.
Bryant gets slightly more room to breathe and isn’t placed on a pedestal in the same way that Reed is and yet Beatty cast the wrong actress in this role.
Whenever I realize that Keaton is appearing in a film, I begin to feel uneasy. This is because she has appeared in a lot of truly dreadful fare, such as Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Town & Country (2001). I do not like her when she is playing a quirky, airy fairy ditz who just has to sing in one long, self indulgent scene (see: Annie Hall (1977) and this is the character that she seems to play most of the time. I find it terribly annoying when she gazes into the camera and expects me to find her adorable as she tilts her head to the side or says something like “La-Di-Da” but I can’t help but feel intense annoyance whenever she does something like this. I am especially irritated because I do think that Keaton has been marvelous on a select few occasions and I find it mind-boggling that she has committed herself to essentially playing one character when she appears to have range. Why can’t she bring out the fiery pugnacity that she possessed in Shoot the Moon (1982), more often? It seems like she has been stuck in a groove for almost four decades and it drives me crazy.
I say all of this because I don’t think that Keaton is on good form in this film. She herself has admitted that she didn’t feel that she had a firm handle on the character and her uncertainty is obvious throughout. She falters in moments that are pivotal in Bryant’s development and we feel as though her character arc has been truncated in some ways. She seems eager to hit emotional highs and in the moments in between she relaxes into the pose of the type of cool, detached cynic who might have appeared in the pages of Vogue magazine. There is always the feeling that she is playing dress up and is not at home in this time period. You always feel as though she’s about to talk about the release of the latest Ingmar Bergman film or head to some dingy bar in order to pick up a sexual partner. Shirley Ann Russell could only do so much when it came to costuming and Keaton never quite adapts to the surroundings that she is working with. It feels like she is trying to play one of the celebrity radicals of the 1970s, Jane Fonda or Vanessa Redgrave, for example, instead of trying to evoke the memory of a forward thinking woman in the late 1910s. I could never shake the feeling that she was entirely out of place and this prevented me from fully investing in Bryant’s dramatic growth over the course of 195 minutes.
For these reasons, I was never all that swept up in Bryant and Reed’s love story, even though it is meant to serve as the center of this story. It finds a far more compelling focus of attention in the form of the arguments that the friends of the main characters have. Individual supporting characters don’t get that much screen time but together, they do leave quite an impression.
One of these supporting characters is O’Neill. He is played by an insanely charismatic Nicholson, who plays O’Neill as an aloof but undeniably talented playwright. This is a successful example of somebody deconstructing their own persona. Nicholson suggests that his gruffness and standoffish attitude is just a front to cover up the fact that he is self conscious and afraid of people who have an interest in getting under his skin. Nicholson is as raffish as ever and his trademark charm is on display but it rings hollow in a way. There is always the sense that O’Neill is not passionately invested in the Communist cause and lives a life separate from this social circle. We are never fully allowed to understand O’Neill and Nicholson is willing to play him as somebody who is enigmatic but impossible to truly get close to.
His catlike grin makes an occasional appearance and we see him gruffly ordering people around but there is always something threatening about him. All of the Communists are so earnest about their beliefs and genuinely think that they would be willing to lay down their lives for the cause. They lack self awareness and imagine themselves as glorious freedom fighters who have a lot of knowledge about what is happening in the newly formed Soviet Union. In reality, they are all sheltered and prefer having pie in the sky discussions about hypothetical situations rather than confronting reality. They live in a bubble where they can argue with their friends without facing real consequences but they convince themselves that they are as important to the movement as somebody who is actually creating change in the Soviet Union. This blinkered worldview does limit their effectiveness but it is fascinating to see them reacting to somebody who is self aware.
O’Neill doesn’t seem to have as many pretensions as they do, about his work having an impact on audiences and shifting the political views of the masses. He stages plays that are about the issues that the common faces but we don’t hear him giving grand speeches about his influence. This is not to say that the film entirely lets him off the hook for being so standoffish and detached. The other Communists are pompous, think too highly of themselves, and look down on the people that they claim to want to help but they have the confidence to be honest about their beliefs. Even if they are living in an echo chamber, they have a willingness to debate and put themselves in vulnerable positions in a way that he doesn’t. He is more honest in his self-assessment but he also uses his self deprecating manner to avoid going out on a limb when discussing his beliefs or the themes in his works.
Beatty is aiming to mythologize these people but he is also comfortable with satirizing them and recognizing their limitations as people and public intellectuals. He has more distance from them and Goldman is a fierce wit as well as b being a shameless self promoter. We cheer as she needles Reed about his habit of picking up attractive young women, introducing them to radical beliefs, and then dropping them. It’s nice to see somebody putting up some resistance to him and who better than the acid tongued Stapleton to knock him down a few pegs? We see her chewing her way through dialogue that asks her to tie the opium trade to political elections in the East Coast and Goldman does it all with the assuredness of somebody who sees themselves as a brilliant sage. You can always tell that she is conscious of the manner in which she lectures the people around her, the upturned nose and pursed lips suggest a fearsome belligerence. She is seen urging one of her comrades to publicize her exploits and tell all of the newspapers about her achievements and this could have easily been a moment in which she turned into a villain. Fortunately, she is not punished for being an attention whore. It becomes clear that she isn’t the idealized version of a freedom fighter that Reed is but we can also mourn the era in which exceptional thinkers could flourish.
Back in 1981, the quality of public intellectualism had significantly declined and people were being exposed to talkback radio and trash television in a way that they hadn’t been before. It became easier to consume infotainment and people were able to watch fluff pieces and tell themselves that they were being educated. Daytime talk shows would aim to spark outrage in audiences by bringing on guests that held controversial views. Unfortunately, these guests were often uneducated and so obviously idiotic that it made it easy for people to yell at the screen instead of really listening to what they were saying and considering a different perspective. People like Goldman were abrasive but they did have an ability to write with passion and real interest in the subjects that they were exploring. We can tell that she is serious about this topic as she moves through her points about Anarchism. You would never have heard somebody like L. Brent Bozell Jr., a speechwriter for Joseph McCarthy and pro-life political commentator, thoughtfully expressing his beliefs rather than ramming them down people’s throats without evidence to support his arguments.
We are also provided with a nuanced view of the break between American liberals and the leaders of the Soviet Union. We see them entering into the country with stars in their eyes as they believe that this is going to be the magical utopia that they have all imagined together. There is a long stretch where they are trying to ignore the harsh realities that they are constantly faced with. Part of this is their own pride as they don’t want to admit that they backed the wrong horse or that they had very little real understanding of the situation in the Soviet Union before visiting Russia. Most of them have publicly spoken out about their belief that being in the Soviet Union will be preferable to being in the United States and to return home and admit that they were wrong, would be humiliating.
This slow realization is painful for them and this was one of the times when I was happy that this was an epic. We do get to spend a lot of time with these characters as they marinate in the fact that their illusions have been shattered. They have to practice what they preach, for once, and this is an eye-opening experience for a lot of them. After spending years and years preaching about the nobility of the common man whilst living like upper middle-class academics themselves, they come to understand that there is nothing that romantic about being poor and working long hours to earn low wages. That sense of them being slowly but surely broken down, could not have been achieved in a 90-minute feature that was working with a more limited scope.
The cinematography is the other major virtue that this film has behind it. Vittorio Storaro is a legend for a reason and he keeps the audience from fully disconnecting in scenes where they could be overwhelmed by the sheer size of this production. There do have to be massive crowd scenes in which the main characters blend in with other passionate Communists but Storaro is able to use depth of field to make us feel a sense of intimacy with the protagonists in these scenes. Beatty will hit us with a sweeping wide shot but Storaro will help us find common ground by returning us to the people that we are familiar with. He is able to make it appear as though they aren’t just engulfed in this giant gathering and they appear to stand out from the crowd. We also get all of the beauty and the spectacle that we expect from this sort of epic. The imagery of Reed making his way through the snow on his pushcart was dizzyingly romantic and you see why people chased the dreams that people like Reed had.
At the end of the day, despite all of its virtues, I am meant to be dealing with this film as a romance and I do not believe that it succeeds in that regard. Reed and Bryant remain the two least interesting characters in this film and whenever we are pummelled with beatific close-ups of Keaton, I began to yawn a little bit. Even though they were romantically involved in real life, it isn’t like the chemistry explodes off the screen. Too often, Beatty has that vacant facial expression in scenes in which he should be convincing us that he feels some great yearning for his love interest. As for Keaton, she seems so concerned with appearing like she has some idea of what she is doing, that she almost seems to be separated from Beatty when they are on screen together. They might as well have been in different rooms when they delivered all of their dialogue as there is very little warmth and camaraderie between them at the best of times.
I would never recommend this to somebody based on the romance that is supposedly at its center. I’d rave about Nicholson, the extraordinary color palette, and some of the thorny ideas that it tangles with. It is a shame that I have to end on a negative note with this article because there is so much to appreciate here. I wouldn’t dissuade you from watching it and yet I just can’t see how voters thought it was appropriate to put the film on this specific list.
