Reds (1981)

  This is one of the movies I watched for extra credit in my Art class.  I would  never have seen it otherwise and probably never have even heard of it.  I wish I could say that it is one of those fantastic underseen gems but it's pretty awful.

Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is a modern 1910's woman who is unfairly held down by the social mores of her time.  That and her husband (Nicholas Coster), who doesn't appreciate her art or her need to be established under her own name.  Then she meets young firebrand John Reed (Warren Beatty) at a rather dull party and gets pulled into his wake at the forefront of American Communist sympathy.  Reed runs a left-wing paper and consorts with radicals like Max Eastman (Edward Hermann), Emma Goldman (Margaret Stapleton), and playwright Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson).  Louise finds it terribly exciting at first, then realizes that A) she'll never measure up to these people or get their attention and B) she'll never have Reed's full attention.  So she leaves to pursue her own path, ending up a war correspondent in Europe.  John finds her and convinces her to join him platonically as he covers the on-going Bolshevik revolution in Russia.  This joint venture sees them finally coming together as partners, which rekindles their previous relationship, even as the tide of public opinion in America turns against them.

The older I get, the more irritating I find Diane Keaton's acting.  Her character is so obnoxious that I started fast-forwarding through scenes just because she was in them.  I didn't even finish watching the movie.  She was in too much of it.  And I've never been one of those people that found Warren Beatty attractive.  He has too much of a puppy face for me.  So I couldn't enjoy him either.

Plus, the movie is three hours long.  That's about two hours too many.  The dramatized scenes are intercut with interviews from people who knew the actual John Reed and Louise Bryant.  Those interviews are the only parts worth watching.  If Beatty had just made a straight documentary with them, I would have watched the hell out of it.  But he didn't, and here we are.

If you are interested in more details about Reed and the people he worked with and championed, I'm sure there are some great books to be read.  Skip this movie.  It is not worth the pain.