Screen
Jr, Colin L. Westerbeck
Screen RAGS TO REVOLUTION HISTORY & THE ROMANTIC VISION IT NEVER FAILS. The more money that's spent on a movie, the less worthwhile it is. At least it can be said of Ragtime that it manages to be...
...You couldn't shut him up...
...His obsession with journalism and politics is suggested only by his frequent departures...
...Certainly nothing about the film itself could explain it...
...Only when Bryant turns up in Russia searching for Reed does Goldman relent a bit, seeing how truly devoted to Reed Bryant is...
...What was he wearing...
...I think that the effect intended is to make all these people into one person, a kind of historical Everyman, as if the past were speaking to us with a single voice in this movie...
...Her historical role as an ideologue and feminist is eclipsed here by her bitchiness toward Bryant...
...It begins with over ten pages of" Notes and Explanations" just so the reader can tell the Socialist Revolutionary Party from the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Yedinstvo from the Maximalists...
...That is what must have exasperated Louise Bryant, if anything did...
...At some point he decided to use these in the movie itself, perhaps to give it that air of authenticity it otherwise lacks...
...Beatty's romantic vision ultimately reduces Reed and Bryant's story to cliches, such as the scene where he tries to make her a dinner without knowing how to cook...
...To me Hollywood gossip is just a lot of static on the sound track of history, but I understand that Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty were an "item" while Beatty was making Reds...
...He wanted to write the Les Mis'erables of the twentieth century, to be our Victor Hugo...
...They have made a movie equivalent of what used to be called "a good read...
...Doctorow's novel to make an amusing movie...
...Morgan, Harry Houdini, and Commodore Perry, for example...
...On the other hand, he realized that no one today could pull off, straight-faced, an historic epic full of all the philosophizing and improbable coincidence, the chance crossing of characters' paths, that Hugo invented...
...The implication is that because Reed found Bryant attractive, Goldman felt so much resentment toward her that it at once undermined all Goldman's principles...
...Diane Keaton looking indomitable in a fur hat...
...Max Eastman (Edward Herrmann) cuts him off with a joke: "Never mind what Wilson said, Jack...
...Michael Weller's screenplay omits other historical characters as well-Henry Ford, J.P...
...Surely what they talked about, argued about, and finally shared were all the intricacies of current events and politics that are either glossed over or omitted in the film...
...Maybe that explains why he took so long with this film, why he agonized over it so much...
...We don't dwell on any two long enough to become disenchanted with them, to notice their superficialities and inadequacies...
...The very foundations of history quake at the thought...
...He was consumed...
...Reed may not have taken Eastman seriously, but Beatty did...
...At one point, for instance, many of the interviewees say, one right after the other, that they can't really remember those days anymore...
...Somewhere in the back of Beatty's mind there is an idea that Bryant and Reed's story can be equated with the story of the Revolution...
...It's pretty tough sledding...
...He took so long to make the film that some of those interviewed - George Jessel, Will Durant, Henry Miller, et al...
...Still here, too, are the anonymous characters of fiction with whom Doctorow peopled the early days of the century: Father (James Olson), Mother (Mary Steenburgen), Younger Brother (Brad Dburif), and of course Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins) and his wife (Debbie Allen...
...Diane Keaton looking tragique in a babushka...
...In the movie Reed is, around Bryant, the same kind of tongue-tied numbskull that Beatty played in Shampoo...
...Reds isn't even that...
...The Russian Revolution had more factions than a Russian novel has characters, and Reed could tell them all apart...
...Forman is, like Doc-torow, a man of more modest, sure-fire talent...
...He had an extraordinary capacity to be as committed to facts and distinctions as he was to ideology...
...Rhinelander Waldo (James Cag-ney), the New York Police commissioner, is still in, as is Booker T. Washington (Moses Gunn...
...But just as Reed is warming to his subject...
...More than that, he was absolutely passionate about the differences among them, as he was about all the political issues of the day that he covered...
...Beatty has a somewhat different approach to history...
...This makes Reds into something of an historical artifact itself...
...This is the easiest kind of kitsch comedy...
...If it weren't for John Reed's legend, or maybe Warren Beatty's, no one would give a movie with this kind of material in it a moment's consideration...
...On the one hand, Doctorow had a BIG ambition...
...Those interested only in Beatty's historical thinking can leave at the film's intermission, by which time his theory has been fully developed...
...Diane Keaton looking frolicsome in a floppy hat...
...It was what made him a great journalist...
...One can't help suspecting that Reed and Bryant's relationship wasn't really as it is depicted here...
...How trivial Beatty's approach makes Reed's story can be seen from the fate that befalls Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton...
...He and scriptwriter Weller have made a movie very much in keeping with the spirit of the original novel...
...So are Stanford White (Norman Mailer), and Evelyn Nesbitt (Elizabeth McGovern) and Harry K. Thaw (Robert Joy), Nesbitt's husband who shot White in a jealous rage...
...Who knows what wonders, or disasters, Robert Altman would have worked with Doctorow's story, had not Dino De Lauren-tis taken the project away from him...
...That's a very simple-minded, romantic concept of history, but then this is a simple-minded, romantic movie...
...But there are still lots of characters left over from E.L...
...Between us and Hugo stands Flaubert's sober calling-to-account of the novel...
...This is the Simultaneous-Orgasm Theory of History...
...He wrote a parody of Hugo that is as entertaining as it is inconsequential...
...The real Jack Reed could never have been sidetracked like Beatty by a snide remark from Max Eastman, or anyone else...
...What allows Ragtime to succeed where Reds fails is that there are so many characters...
...Have you taken a look lately at Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Judging by Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed talked about politics nonstop...
...Yet none of the people interviewed, most of whom are accomplished and famous in their own right, is identified in the movie...
...So Doctorow moderated his ambition with humor...
...In this portrayal of Goldman, as elsewhere in Reds, Beatty has peered into the depths of history and seen a single, overwhelming truth, that Love Conquers All...
...That's more than can be said for Reds, and this does, perhaps, make it worth saying after all...
...Along with its triumph over Russia came the triumph of their love...
...have since died...
...This movie isn't really about the romance between John Reed and Louise Bryant, but something far less significant, far less engaging: the romance that Beatty found in Keaton...
...Each appears on the right-hand side of a black seamless backdrop, and each has his or her reminiscence cut into sequences that parallel everyone else's...
...Their quality of caricature is the key to their success...
...Milos Forman's movie, like Doctorow's novel, deals as lightly with history as it does with human relationships...
...A group of his friends, fellow radicals and journalists, including Louise Bryant (Keaton), gather around as Reed starts expatiating on whether Wilson can be trusted to keep America out of the war in Europe...
...At least it can be said of Ragtime that it manages to be a good entertainment...
...As part of his own research, he went looking for all kinds of people who knew Bryant and Reed, and with those he could find, he did interviews, which he filmed...
...From the movie version of Ragtime, Emma Goldman has been omitted altogether...
...He was incapable of thinking about anything else...
...There is a point in the movie when John Reed (Beatty) has just returned from covering the Democratic National Convention at which Woodrow Wilson was nominated...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 3
