I feel Warren Beatty is a little overrated but you've got to give him points for this movie, a big budget Hollywood movie about American socialists during World War One. He doesn't quite nail it - the personal story is excellent but there's a lot of scenes of people in committee meetings yelling at each other.
Still, they're yelling at each other about communism, empathetically.
It helps that it's got movie stars and focuses on a love story between John Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), with their various squabblings and separations, and her fling with Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson).
Random thoughts:
* when Beatty and Keaton have an argument about her feeling like a sideshow in his life and him encouraging her to do stuff I went "that's a chat Beatty has with his girlfriends and probably more than once, maybe even with Keaton"
* the real life narrator device works wonderfully
* all acting is extremely good
* Warren Beatty tends to give the same performance (hesitant, pleasant) and he doesn't have the drive of say Jack Nicholson or Gene Hackman but you get used to this
* they actually could have made this cheaply just by keeping the actors indoors
* set design, photography, etc all excellent.
The film is proof that doing 72 takes on something doesn't necessarily make it better. All those dialogue scenes and communist party scene moments feel rewritten to death. It lacks a universal common touch of emotion.
But its ambition is fabulous.
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