Moving Pictures

Revolt and Revolution

WARREN BEATTY’S HYBRID FILM MASTERPIECE HAS THE BELCOURT SEEING ‘REDS’

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

I’m more than a little obsessed with hybrid films that blur the line between narrative and documentary movies. I wrote all about these genre bending gems right here in The Contributor when The Belcourt Theatre screened Pixote back in February. Héctor Babenco’s fictional, coming of age crime drama features a cast of kids who were actually living on the streets of São Paulo, Brazil. The movie gives audiences fictional characters and made up storylines, but they’re all inspired by real life and the cast of mostly non-actors adds to the film’s brutal realism.

Warren Beatty’s 1981 masterpiece Reds is a biopic of John Reed (Beatty), the American communist activist whose journalism helped to propel the American labor and antiwar movements of the early 20 century. Reed wrote Ten Days that Shook the World , his firsthand account of the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, and he’s the only American buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Reds is brimming with revolt and revolution, but it’s focused on Reed’s globe-spanning love affair with suffragist and writer Louis Bryant (Diane Keaton). It’s a movie about real people and real events, but they’re presented by actors following a script. Of course, this is true of any historical drama, but Beatty ups the ante by also casting a chorus referred to only as “The Witnesses” — venerable activists, artists and rabble rousers who knew Reed and Bryant, and were actually part of the events depicted in the film. Reds is movie making of the highest order and one of the best examples of how narrative and documentary film techniques and devices can be paired together to create both deeper stories and more moving history lessons.

Reds is three and a half hours long. It was scheduled as a 15 week shoot, but actually took a full year of filming in five different countries. Legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) captures the struggle, strife, passion, glory and despair of Reds with Academy Award-winning lensing. And the new 4K restoration screening at The Belcourt gives every desperate embrace, every exploding bomb, every heroic parade and impassioned speech the big screen treatment that a romantic epic like Reds truly requires.

Beatty was relentless when it came to Reds , dedicating an entire decade to writing most of the script, securing financing, producing, directing and also starring as Reed. Beatty the obsessed filmmaker casts himself perfectly as Reed the obsessed writer and revolutionary, and Keaton is, of course, great as Bryant — a proto-feminist who leaves her staid middle class marriage to live with Reed in Greenwich Village where their lives are caught-up in bohemian circles of writers and artists, free love and radical politics. Playwright Eugene O’Neill is played by Jack Nicholson in one of his slimiest roles, and the mother of American anarchism, Emma Goldman is played by Maureen Stapleton. Real-life novelist Jerzy Kosinski takes a scene stealing turn as Soviet politician Grigory Zinoviev, and Beatty’s “Witnesses” include painter Andrew Dasburg, journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, and the great novelist Henry Miller, whose mesmerizing remembrances, dripping in Brooklyn-ese are a highlight in a film with lots of highlights.

Reds is an epic romance that can stand-up to any other film in that category, but it’s also a social history lesson that manages to illuminate the lives and deeds of the men and women who fought for labor rights and against American imperialism in the early days of the 20th century. And despite Beatty’s reputation as a Hollywood leftist Reds is remarkably honest in its grounded criticisms of both capitalism’s exploitation and excesses, and the starving utopias of communism.

Reds is the Weekend Classic at The Belcourt Theatre on Saturday, April 15 and Sunday, April 16. Go to www.belcourt.org for times and tickets

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www. joenolan.com.