Reds (1981)

Based on the true story of Jack Reed (played by Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), two American socialists and writers. During WW1 they actively campaigned for and wrote about socialist causes. When the news of the Russian Revolution broke this was seen as the chance for socialism to gain a greater foothold and popularity. Reed went to Russia to see what could be learned from the revolution and took the ideas back to the US, forming the Communist Labor Party of America. Things weren't all plain-sailing though, both in the relationship between Reed and Bryant and in politics.Written and directed by Warren Beatty, the movie is really just a medium for Beatty to express his political views. And what misguided views they are! Ultra-left-wing, to the point of glorifying an incredibly reprehensible totalitarian regime.Before we even get to that, we have the background, setting out Reed and Bryant's relationship plus their politics. This is incredibly dull and padded, taking about 90 minutes for something that could have taken 15-30 minutes.The movie does pick up pace towards the end, but, as mentioned, not in a good direction.The ending is quite emotional, though to get to it you have to sit through a 190-or-so minute movie that could have been done in about 120 minutes.Despite the idealistic, misguided plot and extravagant (in terms of running time) direction, can't fault the performances. Beatty puts in a solid performance as Reed and Keaton is great as Bryant. Good supporting cast too: Jack Nicholson (as Eugene O'Neill), Paul Sorvino and Gene Hackman, among others.

Perhaps it's inevitable that "Reds" became a kind of Rorschach test when it first appeared. Liberals, meaning almost all of Hollywood, could still feel a twinge of nostalgia for those heady Bolshie days, while conservatives recoiled at any attempt to humanize Americans who even Woodrow Wilson considered traitors. But it's over 30 years later, and the Jack Reeds and Emma Goldmans seem almost quaint today. So too do the Warren Beattys and Diane Keatons, and the limousine liberalism they embody. Viewed at this distance, "Reds" is neither a masterpiece nor a piece of agitprop, just a very long, very good but rather flawed movie. And in fact it's surprisingly frank about who Reed was, and what the Bolsheviks were. In a late scene between Reed and Goldman, the latter is utterly disgusted with what the Reds have become, complaining that they are just as fascistic as the crew they replaced, and the people are just as bad off because "nothing works!" Reed is not listening. Revolutions take time, and they need a little terror to keep those pesky counterrevolutionaries in line.In the end, however, this is a love story. Does it work? That depends how hard you think about it. Louise is always chasing after Jack, hating herself for it, leaving him, going back to him, rinse repeat. It gets a bit repetitive. The final scene makes no sense to me at all, even though it's been telegraphed for the preceding 2 1/2 hours. Luckily the chemistry between Beatty and Keaton holds it together.Thank god for the testimonials, a surprisingly effective device which served to dispense with a lot of exposition. Otherwise this would've been a 6-hour movie.

When experiencing or listening to a story, the most important thing to consider is the point of view of the teller. Reds starts off and interweaves interviews of those who had some contact with either or both Louise Bryant and Jack Reed and put their story into both big-picture context and social irrelevance. This is delightful. The film, outside of this tells us Jack Reeds impression of his experiences as a radical writer who finds himself turned into an idealistic politician with his self-engrossed sometimes wife trying to be important by his side. I found their relationship hard to watch as Beatty turned Louise Bryant into some unbalanced and immoral slut. This is not so delightful and failed as a love story that I would care about. What is the real glue of the experience are the interpersonal speeches laid out by Jack Nicholson as play write Eugene O'Neil and the political summaries presented by Jean Stapleton and Emma Goldberg that seem to cut to the core, almost the way science fiction movies need that smart speech of 2 minutes that moves everything along. The movie needed to move along further as the darkness of post-revolution Russia, cell-bound Norway and the political basements in America show us frustration and loneliness but tell us nothing of what the fight was all about.

Reds is fits the definition of a boring film. It is slow paced, an historical drama that you probably have seen one thousand times before, and utterly uninteresting, I mean, it looks like something that you can learn in a history class or something. It clearly isn't a good film, no matter what you say. It follows this guy interpreted by Warren Beatty, that is a defender of the revolutionary's ideas. But again, I think it's worth noting to say that nothing interesting happens or whats or ever. The most exciting thing about this film are the discussions and the conflicts between him and his wife. That's not saying too much, since that it's not like the most original thing in the world. And they always ended together, despite all their differences. And yeah, the characters always makes a good film, so the result of the film is that bad mainly because the characters (based in real-life persons) in that film are just horrible. They seems to have no personality, and despite the film being 3 hours long, the development simply don't happens. It just shows the protagonist traveling around the world, and he occasionally appears in the middle of discussions and manifests, while her wife becomes frustrated and bored, but nothing made in a way that would push the attention of the viewer to the film. All in all, it's very boring, overlong, and I find the idea of putting 'witnesses' to comment about the events to be horrible. It's not a documentary, for god's sake! Anyways, it looks a very accurate depiction of the US situation in the mid 20s, with the poetry being faded by the political subjects, an interesting idea in fact, but as a film, it has nothing to offer, at least for me. The cinematography, the sound, the editing, art direction, the acting, the story itself looked sub-par or average at best. It looks like a film intended to be taken as much more as something to watch in the school than anything else, or something that would pass in the History channel. 5.0/10