Word: reed
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...McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he's careful to show the boyish vulnerability underneath. Small-scale and unaggressive, he can't sustain a picture alone, so he surrounds himself with high-voltage actors and situations, and he counts on the audience to look to him for relief. In John Reed, Beatty found a figure ideally suited to his own quiet narcissism--a modern saint, political innocent and martyr. And, rounding the character slightly by showing his insensitivity to others, "You love yourself; you fuck me" brays Diane Keaton) Beatty gives a smart, delicate performance, sleepy but cognizant, doggedly pursuing his ideals...
...film is subtly shot from Reed's point of view--staring after his wife as she charges down the stairs, moving in on a rally--and when the camera turns on him it gazes with the dewy eyes of a cheerleader. Beatty and his co-writer, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, have clearly done heaps of research on the politics of the period, but they have buried it all in the film's margins and between the lines; they use the Russian Revolution and leftist ideology to add texture, while dramatically the film is shaped entirely by the love story...
Some people respond to the romance; I find it thin. Bryant snappily seduces Reed by telling him she'd like to see him with his pants off, and soon enough she's arguing with him about being treated like a wife. They're a couple before we know it, and they're dissolving before we see what kept them together. This is no doubt deliberate--a modern, detached paradigm of "bohemian" relationships, all that petty squabbling and navel-gazing. Only in the second half of the movie, when they have no scenes together, do we become emotionally involved in their...
...dialogue, since much of it is in their Front Page-filtered notion of how Americans, particularly journalists, talk--the hardboiled, crackerjack repartee. Neither nor Beatty nor Griffiths has the emotional equipment as writers to give Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson)--who has an affair with Bryant when Reed is at a convention--the raging, messy confessional speech he so obviously needs; and so O'Neill puts it in a letter which we never see. They keep Nicholson brooding in the shadows like a character in film noir, relying on our memories of his explosions in other films to know that...
...Neill is an unsparing realist; he's the one who points out that Reed is an artist, not a politician. Reed ends up defending the individual's right to dissent against the Party's call for unquestioning loyalty, exclaiming that if you purge dissent you purge what's unique in a man, and he's answered by a tremendous explosion that signals a White-army attack. That's a good, absorbing scene, one of a couple in the second half that pit idealist against politician. But they all have that Robert Bolt-Q.E.D. quality. Bolt's latest play...