Dir. Warren Beatty. 200 minutes.
4.5/5
Dramatizing the adventures of John Reed, a swashbuckling Marxist journalist who covered the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, “Reds” seemed calculated to annoy, offend and alienate almost everyone. Nonetheless, Warren Beatty’s pet project became one of the most profitable films of the Reagan era — enough to please any capitalist.
Reed, played by Beatty, projects the youthful earnestness of a man who believed Bolshevism could spread to the U.S. through labor unions, and that this would be a good thing. What saves “Reds” from becoming a mere political screed is the presence of Eugene O’Neill, played by Jack Nicholson — cynical, coarse and counterrevolutionary, but also the film’s sharpest character. This is a movie in dialogue with itself. Novelist Jerzy Kosinski also makes a small but unforgettable appearance as Bolshevik bureaucrat Grigori Zinoviev.
The film is broken up by interviews with “witnesses” to the real events: former ACLU Executive Director Roger Nash Baldwin, novelist Henry Miller and founding members of Communist groups both American and Soviet. “Reds” is also Beatty’s answer to “Lawrence of Arabia”: an old-style Hollywood epic, complete with tearful monologues delivered by Oscar-winning actors and sprawling battle scenes in which trains blow up and men fall from horseback. There’s even an intermission.
This May 1, “Reds” reminds us in grand style that America’s history is far more varied and surprising than we might remember.
