A great film must, by necessity, strike a universal chord in the human consciousness. Otherwise, it's just an elaborate way to sell buttered popcorn. Citizen Kane was a great film. The Searchers was a great film. Bladerunner was a great film. The genre doesn't matter—a great film speaks to the human condition.
Reds: 25th Anniversary Edition is another reminder of what elevates a movie to "great film" status. Made in 1981, Reds was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won three, garnering Warren Beatty a Best Director honor, as well as earning Maureen Stapleton an Oscar for Best supporting Actress, and acknowledging Vittorio Sioraro's work for Best Cinematography.
Despite its backdrop of communist ideology at the dawn of the twentieth century, Reds is ultimately a story about the power and pratfalls of love and passion. The story of John Reed and Louise Bryant is not, in Beatty's vision, the tale of a couple of American communists, any more than his later Bugsy was a gangster story. Instead, Reds is an intimate love story set against of a tableau of epic proportions.
The relationship between Reed (Beatty) and Bryant (Diane Keaton) mirrors the tumultuous events of 1915-1921, beginning with America's tenuous involvement in World War I and culminating with the aftermath of Russia's Bolshevik Revolution. It's a complex, sprawling film with themes of idealism versus reality, personal sacrifice in the name of love, and disillusionment with the constraints of bureaucracy, among others.
Beatty's solution to tying all of this together was ingeniously simple. Rather than transition the myriad events going on in conventional cinematic terms, he stitched the film together through a series of interviews with Reed's contemporaries. Shot against a black background with a single light source, these "witnesses" serve as a framework who enrich the story's credibility. These are people who lived through the period, who knew Reed and Bryant and who aren't remotely hesitant to share their outrageously varying opinions.
The lines in their faces trace a timeline of the routes America took—or could have taken—throughout the twentieth century. In the end, they show us attitudes weren't so different in the early days of the twentieth century than they are now. They were just more discreet then.
There are naysayers who will insist Reds was a platform for Warren Beatty to express his left-leaning viewpoint. Those people are wrong. They are borne of the same ilk who believe Citizen Kane was a sensational attempt to discredit William Randolph Hearst. True, both films are politically slanted to a degree, but more by necessity to drive the story than by personal agenda. In order to tell the story of Reed, Beatty had to focus on the protagonist's idealistic zeal toward worker's rights. But in the course of the film, we see that idealism slowly deteriorate as the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution takes hold in Russia.
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