Film Dunce is a weekly series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a movie that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never seen. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
Given the circumstances – the conditions really – under which Reds was first released on multiplex sized screens across America in December of 1981, I did my best to recreate a proper environment in which to viddie the political period piece that was reportedly shot over a year in five countries. Despite nifty tablet and laptop technology working to sate standards of modern convenience and pleasure, I still believe there are some films that are simply not meant to be seen on anything that stretches less than a few feet by a few feet. Wearing my dunce cap in my kitchen in San Francisco, setting up the projector, I considered how and why Reds had never come my way before. Like any other conscientious Film Dunce, you proceed internally with some kind reasoning as to why you haven’t seen the title yet and then confront these reasons with an initial viewing.
Reds was made before I was born so there was no chance of a seeing it first run but I did grow up watching its salty director/writer/actor Warren Beatty in the excellent 1990 Dick Tracy opposite Madonna and then later I rented the ribald 1975 bedroom farce Shampoo on VHS in high school. I think it was my cartoonish experience with Beatty during adolescence that instilled in me with some kind of incredulity regarding with the director’s $35 million investment in an epic about American leftist journalist John Reed who gargles big words and big concepts about schisms within Russian Communist factions during the early 20th century while conducting a turbulent love affair with Louise Bryant played by Diane Keaton and pulling it off.
I learned halfway through the first part of Reds that the romance between Reed and Bryant would spin heavily on the skeletal axis of American and Russian history during the turn of the 20th century rendering it just another big-budgeted miscarriage reliant on scandal and sensuality to get butts in seats and to keep them there. It has that patriotic too-big-to-fail feel to it; and not because it does not have a didactic agenda but because of its concentration on the Reed/Bryant relationship in combination with a failed aesthetic that both characters support from scene to scene. So instead, the story of Jack Reed and Louise Bryant as told by Warren Beatty comes off as a masturbatory Hollywood concoction from someone just as interested in early Communism (as the ideology came into the hands of American liberals pre-McCarthyism) as they are in designing an archetype as a lothario and especially in one that prances around the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in beautiful pea coats, wool scarves, cashmere sweaters and tailored tweed jackets.
Throughout, Reed’s appearance is distractingly and painfully modern. Beatty’s hair, I noticed is always and perfectly blow-dried, product-poofed and neatly in place even when he contracts scurvy during the the second half of the film and also on his deathbed. The most we get in efforts to convince us that Reed is enduring something, anything besides being super horny and super groomed for each shot is some five o’clock shadow and some chapped lips being passed off as a visual signifier for hospitalization because of a hint at kidney failure. In this way Reds acts as a precursor for failed period piece aesthetics. Recall others that came afterward like Oliver Stone’s Alexander and Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain. It makes you sincerely appreciate Mel Gibson’s multi-million dollar fantasy Braveheart, making the 1995 bloody war biopic feel and look objective. This is only part of a gestalt of serious problems Reds has with regard to vanity and self-serving intent on Beatty’s behalf imparted presumably because of some kind of obsession with Jack Reed as a historical American idealist, however conscious or subconscious. It is a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy but without an escapist’s pay off. It’s hard to care, it’s hard to find empathy for and it’s hard to pay attention to. These easy fantasies, first with Beatty as director and then as lead man and thirdly the fantasy of film existing as a whole as a mass produced product, fit like transparent Russian dolls coated in the thick paint of American tackiness. For this measure unfortunately Reds ultimately requires an incredible suspension of disbelief.
There were two opportunities for this film to be saved. Those opportunities were the mighty talents of Paul Sorvino and Jack Nicholson, however both performances were sorely botched. Sorvino’s appearances, always as a shouting Louis Fraina with an over the top accent, came in and out of the narrative much as a puppet show would- short jerky, largely irrelevant and with childlike intensity. Nicholson as far as the ’80s went, was doled out his shittiest role yet as the drunken playwright with a silver tongue, Eugene O’Neill. His convenient stature as an active intellectual in the right place at the right time afforded him a hump fest with Bryant while Reed came and went on journalistic business trips. But other than that we don’t get anything from his performance big enough to forgive the rest.
And why not give some of this three hour long epic more screen time to the peripheral players? Our pitted protagonists remain the same with little to no character development as they contentiously galavant from Portland to New York to Russia and back again (and again) trying to selfishly forge careers and maintain a stable relationship. The romantic plot parallel to the world history wrap up 1914-1917 is maudlin at best. The back and forth of adult break up/make up was nauseating enough to prompt me turn down my ultra-rigged surround sound (borrowed computer speakers and a subwoofer on top of kitchen cabinets).
The high points include the terrific stock sounds of stray bullets and horses crying out during a battle scene toward the end as well as Nicholson’s verbal smack down on Keaton when he no longer wants to hang around to hook up upon her return from a politically boiled over Russia. The lowest point possible is entirely uncomfortable and unexplained need to continually show a flash back of Keaton and Beatty doing it doggy style with their newly bought relationship-saving puppy interrupting the rhythm. Somewhere between the end of the Bryant/O’Neill sub-affair and the beginning of the third act, the convolution of the characters’ geography tests your patience. If at this point you were confused as to why Beatty was sprinting across an exploding desert presumably in Russia (or was it Algeria?) for the love of Communism completely unmarred by the blast on the train he was just on and were still watching then you must have been at least somewhat wrapped up in the Reed/Bryant romance. I was not however.
If you do get a hold of Reds and plan to watch it in any capacity the nonfiction, documentary style interview snippets from people who were around during this time and passed through in New York City during World War I (Rebecca West, Adela Rogers St. John) are worth watching. An uncanny appearance from Mr. Henry Miller himself is made. In fact after Miller states, “I think that a guy who’s always interested in the condition of the world and changing it either has no problems of his own or refuses to face them,” I decided that these “witness” interviews were the project Beatty should have salvaged for the his feature film idea. They are certainly the most valuable pieces of footage from the entire film.
by Sky Madden
