Reds (1981) Warren Beatty

I was looking for films that could fit in a season of films on journalists, and found a website that enlisted 100 films on journalism.  Reds was number 33.  I clicked on it, read the synopsis and went down to get it.  I thought I was going to watch a film about the "true story" of John Reed, the radical American journalist,  but instead I ended up watching a very badly disguised chick-flick. 

In my opinion, Warren Beatty was truly interested in John and Louise's passionate love story, but was actually to afraid to admit it, so he threw in all this material where we see John being a reporter, traveling to Russia, fighting for his ideals... and Louise writing her articles, working at Paris, being a feminism supporter... which only end up making the movie too frustrating long, since it never seems to be reaching nowhere, instead of just focusing on their love story. 

In a way I think you can draw a parallelism between John and Louise's relationship and the movie itself.  The way Louise is always asking John to define the relationship, always asking him "as what" will she be accompanying him.  John never gets to admit that he wants her to go as the love of his life, not even in the end, when he's dying in bed and he draws the question back at her, and she responds as comrades and he nods back in response.  Throughout the whole movie they try to be it all, coworkers, comrades, friends, lovers, husband and wife... but the truth is that they're more important to each other than they'll get themselves to admit... they're each others soul mates.  Perhaps the relationship would've worked better if they had been completely honest with themselves.  The same goes for the movie, Beatty tries too hard for it to be everything it's not, a film on journalism, a political film, a revolutionary film, a feminist film, a biography film, etc, instead of actually facing that, for him, it was always meant to be a film about a love story.