Warren Beatty cracked the biopic code in producing, co-writing (with Trevor Griffiths), and directing this dramatization of the relationship between 10 Days That Shook the World author John Reed (Beatty) and activist-writer Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), who covered Russia’s October Revolution alongside him. You could argue that Reds is more about Bryant’s experience than Reed’s (it opens on her unhappily married life in 1915 Portland). Certainly their tumultuous relationship is at the film’s center, with the history and politics swirling around them. That emphasis gives Reds the critical distance from its subject(s) that most biopics lack.
So does the ingenious choice to intersperse the dramatized narrative with talking-head interviews featuring contemporaries of Bryant and Reed, whose segments consist of a mixture of fading memories, ardent testimony, and gossip. They’re credited as “witnesses,” but they add to the film’s fragmented point of view more than they provide a confirmable truth. (Not that the movie’s own anti-capitalist, pro-labor politics aren’t always clear.)
Beatty wisely chose to work with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won an Oscar (Beatty did as well for directing) for the film. They present Reds in painterly tones and compositions, so that it exists in a clearly delineated past, but not one so preciously preserved that it has lost all contemporary relevance. (In contrast, the interview segments with the “witnesses” take place against stark black backgrounds, giving the faces a crisp contemporaneity.)
Also crucial to the movie’s success—especially given its three hour and 15 minute runtime—is the editing by Dede Allen and Craig McKay. Three montages in particular stand out: the endless cups of coffee consumed during an early interview Bryant conducts with Reed, where political and romantic sparks begin to fly; a series of dances between them at various parties, as she tries to find her place after moving to New York City; and a rundown of their parallel journalistic coverage of the 1917 revolution in Russia while on the ground, employing voiceovers from both reciting their reports.
As in that latter sequence, both lead performances are perfectly in sync throughout. Beatty plays Reed as a bit of a dope (downplaying his beauty, as Beatty often did), if still a dynamic and passionate speaker. He’s at his best expectantly waiting for Bryant’s reactions, eyes alive and mouth slightly open. This makes sense, because Keaton plays Bryant like a vibrant flower figuring out how to bloom (one subplot involves Bryant’s affair with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, played by a shockingly tender Jack Nicholson). When Reed, very early on, invites Bryant to come with him to New York City, she demands to know: “What as?” Answering that question will be the crux of their shared life.
Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts.
(10/31/2025)
