REDS THROUGH ROSY GLASSES

...There is still another chuckle when Reed asks Louise to come with him to New York and she angrily asks him what he expects her to come "as...

...The puppy tries to get under the door as they make love...

...For those whose hearts are moved by that sentiment, Reds will be a heart-warming experience...

...Luckily she takes a while getting there, and while Reed's education is presented mostly through conversation, it is still the most original and convincing segment of the movie...

...They tend to lecture each other as if they were characters in a John Reed comic book...

...Watch Diane now—as she screws her face into cute defiance—and look at Warren, he is going to sit down on the stairs, his face is turning pink, he is about to shed tears...

...Everything, even the outdoor views, is shown through a vaselined glow— yet little is visually memorable...

...But this movie is nothing if not a repository of self-conscious visuals...

...It becomes evident that she does not feel obliged to go home to 213 her husband, and Beatty's boyish face registers the expectation that she will sleep with him...

...We see no contact with the husband...

...She interviews him all night long in her Portland studio...

...In a scene on a train, Beatty turns on Zinoviev, shouting that when you don't allow a revolutionary to love his wife, when "you separate a man from what is unique in him . . . you purge dissent . . . you kill the revolution...

...I should pause here for a word about the talking heads, the eighty- and ninety-year-old "witnesses," many of them famous in their own right, whose recollections are spliced into the movie...

...The lady, however, doesn't simply explain or reassure: she packs—and so we have a gimmicky parting of lovers to set up a gimmicky reunion...

...So the question for the viewer will probably be decided on one's moment-by-moment needs and capacities...

...It's good for another laugh when she encounters him at a dinner party, gets him outside and says she wants to see him with his pants down...

...The test may be most severe for those who regard themselves as radicals, for Reds is imbued with good intentions and high hopes failed...

...he asks, his voice loaded with sexual menace...

...Beatty dies—like Charles Foster Kane—as a cup falls from Keaton's hands...

...But for someone as romantic as you, it would destroy you...

...And so Louise does come, and we are on to the next sequence, where in a pastiche imitation of time passing a la Citizen Kane, we see Beatty and Keaton bouncing up and down dancing at a series of wild Village parties, as only their costumes change...

...In Reds, capitalism is nothing but monopoly and imperialism, and there are no kind words for it...

...Meanwhile Keaton, having suffered a change of heart, is on her way first to Finland—where Reed has been arrested trying to escape—then to Moscow...

...If they merely talked, they might discover there is no reason to quarrel...

...You want to get married...

...In fact it is impossible to believe we are seeing John Reed and Louise Bryant...

...With a thousand little nudges the camera instructs us to appreciate the endearing portrayals of Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton...

...How does Louise feel about her work, and what is her work like...

...As for Nicholson, Keaton informs him, in words that would look good in a comic balloon, "Jack and I are perfectly capable of living with our beliefs...

...Nicholson glowers, but Keaton retires for the night with Beatty...

...The style is due, I think, to the undigested globules of abstract language that are hurled across the screen whenever the principals talk politics...

...Take, for instance, the opening sequences where Reed meets Louise Bryant...

...And I don't want that to happen—for Jack's sake...

...She is still angry with him for unclear reasons, still maintaining her substanceless independence, and those who believe in what they see are wondering if she will ever again sleep with him...

...Is it the end that matters, or the means...

...In too many scenes, a character enters and is introduced, spouts his "position"—and departs...

...Next we find Nicholson and Keaton walking through flowing sand dunes arm in arm, and there is a vaseline shot of them standing nude, a la Malibu, in the ocean waves...

...In a sequence reminiscent of the Marx Brothers, we cut repeatedly to Keaton journeying across the tundra, hidden in a peasant cart, stumbling in the snow, sidestepping a herd of caribou—but pressing onward ever onward to join her beloved...

...Reed returns to Russia in a futile bid to gain official recognition for his group, giving rise to another dubious shouting scene between Beatty and Keaton...

...It is in his technique—as actor, co-writer, and director—that Warren Beatty falls back on the conventions of de Millian bombast and bourgeois heartbreak...

...O'Neill, you see, drank, and so does Nicholson, gloweringly...

...When this is combined with Keaton's mousy twitches and Beatty's ingratiating shamble, we have scenes that convey not love and jealousy but the cleverness of actors acting...

...The amiable grin relieved by the earnest frown is Beatty's only movie mask...

...The triangle starts turning when Beatty goes off to report on riots in Chicago and leaves Keaton behind with the Provincetown Players...

...Regardless of where one treads along the issues that have divided radicals, it is hard not to yearn sentimentally for times when good and evil were seemingly so easy to identify...

...Ironically, the non-actor Kosinski creates the film's only character who does not seem to be acting...

...Does one long to be on the side of the angels, or does one require what Henry James called "felt life...

...Since normal travel lanes are closed, Keaton, unlike the real-life Bryant, must undertake the ardors of secret travel...

...The lady won't come as mistress, paramour, or concubine...

...They are wonderful, and the vitality and spontaneity of what they say makes an amusing contrast with what the movie shows us...

...It's Thanksgiving, Beatty replies, in a line straight from sitcom, why not come as a turkey...

...Instead we get a glowering, mannered delivery that never allows us to forget we are watching Jack Nicholson...

...It is so worried about taking politics straight on that it takes all its emotions sideways...

...Without further ado, Beatty and Keaton get married, and he gives her a puppy in a gift-wrapped box...

...By the standard of means, however, Reds falls short, for its moment-by-moment texture is a patchwork of simplisms held together by trickery...

...Blessedly deprived of the querulous Keaton, Beatty in Moscow is initiated into Bolshevik reality via a series of grinding meetings presided over by the bureaucrat Zinoviev, played by the novelist Jerzy Kosinski...

...Jack Nicholson, in one of his virtuoso impersonations, certainly captures the set of O'Neill's mustache, but there is little about the character we see to suggest a man passionately involved with the theater...

...Then Beatty returns, shambling with flowers, his amiable grin on his face just as we have come to expect it from Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, and Heaven Can Wait...

...And it is flattering to the vaguely radical sensibility to find this end product of a $50 million outlay of Hollywood capital pitching itself to the yearnings of leftist idealism...

...Instead the movie plunges into sectarian politics, as Reed's Communist Labor party splits from the Socialist party and then from Louis Fraina's Communists...

...Why aren't you in Chicago with Jack...

...214 With the revolution over, Reed returns to the United States—but the major event of his life, the writing of Ten Days That Shook The World, is passed over...

...But what does Louise feel about leaving her husband—or why was she with her husband in the first place...

...She says she may not be there when he gets back...

...To Reed's frustration, Zinoviev persists in the futile strategy of trying to infiltrate the American labor movement— and he insists Beatty must stay in Moscow to do propaganda work...

...Beatty is the innocent sexy idealist, and unlike John Reed he keeps his infidelities out of sight...

...The movie has little to tell us about her character or any other...

...It seems that in the glory days of Greenwich Village around World War I, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, and Eugene O'Neill all regaled one another with capsules of political wisdom...

...In this way the movie solves in TV-style the problems of indicating Louise's feminism and getting her from Portland to New York with Reed...

...In a substitute for genuine conflict, our stars shout at one another...

...Through all the ups and downs, the dreams and disillusionments of John Reed and Louise Bryant, there is an unquestioned belief that World War I was an invention of Western finance, and that the warring powers were united in the desire to keep socialism from breaking out around the world...

...WHILE I DIDN'T WORRY about Keaton's threat, I found the Moscow scenes that followed the most interesting ones in the movie...

...Our dream is dying," Emma Goldman tells Reed—and though he resists, we see he is getting the point...

...Since little of this is integrated into the film's dramatic substance, it has to be spliced together with movie trickiness...

...whines the lip-quivering Keaton...

...But they are brightly lit in closeups against dark backgrounds, to show us, I suppose, the lines and furrows of their magnificent old faces...

...Sure enough, Nicholson approaches her, with an elaborate business involving her pouring him a drink...

...He has his things, I have mine," Keaton replies...

...But the Russian Revolution is so exciting—and the crowd marching in front of the cardboard Winter Palace is so beautifully lit—that of course she does...

...She is inspired by a comic-bubble speech he makes to the Russian workers...

...I would rather have seen them placed in their surroundings, even at the sacrifice of arty cinematography...

...She wants to let him know what's been going on, but "you don't have to tell me anything," he says...

...But then the film might only be 90 minutes long, and we would not have the spectacle of Beatty coming to get Keaton on the front lines in France and taking her with him to Russia...

...Beatty discovers the poem and then gets angry, assuming Keaton and Nicholson have been carrying on after marriage, and ah, what comic-book irony that he is mistaken...

...Who is Louise, for that matter, other than someone who reacts with monotonous hostility to Reed and to the minor threats to her independence...

...THE MOVIE-STAR QUALITY Of the characters IS never more apparent than in the triangulation scenes with Eugene O'Neill...

...Or see the glass halfempty, and allow oneself to feel annoyance at scenes in which the emotional content is hyped and cutesy and cannot be believed...

...And alas it is not very long—only three hours— before Keaton arrives for the movie's finale, giving her all at last for love as her man lies dying in a Moscow hospital...

...he will not let himthankfully— return to his wife...

...The only trace of Nicholson is a love poem he has sent, which Keaton inserts into a copy of Leaves of Grass...

...In fact there is little in the film that would not better suit the comic-book format...

...Then she doesn't—and this is good for a laugh...

...You wanna go running all over the world...

...If one believes in the ideals that all leftists vaguely share, then the general values of Reds' maker cannot be faulted...

...In three hours and 20 minutes (not counting an intermission), the eye is twitched along from one nervous cut to another, TV-style, as if the film-makers do not trust the content of the film to speak for itself...

...The trouble is, the style of their emotions is as hackneyed as the gimmicky dinner Warren so engagingly burns...

...Just as death brings love, the movie seems to be saying that we can now embrace the political ideals that died with the brutality of the Bolsheviks...

...Socialists—as distinct from Communists —have traditionally been concerned with the means, and indeed, the picture itself instructs us to turn sadly from a revolution that rationalizes deceit and oppression...

...At that very moment—as chance would have it—the train is attacked by the White Army, and the action degenerates into a melange resembling an American western, with Beatty running earnestly among horses and cannon...