I admit it. It’s not the Marxist lovefest I expected.
I went into Warren Beatty’s 1981 opus expecting it to be another Hollywood love letter to socialism. Instead, what I witnessed was a remarkably honest portrait of a doomed love affair between two seminal American communist radicals whose ideals pitted them against one another and drove them apart despite their deep devotion to one another.
Reds is a sweeping historical political drama which encompasses the roots of the American socialist Left, World War 1, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The film is built around the tempestuous love affair between John Reed and Louise Bryant played by Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton respectively. Its major achievement is how it manages to expose the limitations of Marxism and socialism by showing how the central characters’ allegedly revolutionary ideals undermined their ability to simply be with one another.
As expected, the film spells out some of the facile appeal of socialism at the outset. Beatty takes a very classical approach to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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