By the time Diane Keaton co-starred in Warren Beatty’s 1981 historical epic, “Reds,” she already had racked up an enviable set of credits, including roles in two “Godfather” movies and a fruitful collaboration with Woody Allen that included the 1978 Academy Award for her performance in “Annie Hall.”
In New Hollywood’s pantheon of stars, she personified a type: an intelligent, independent and unconventional woman, often portrayed in a relationship with a man but never quite possessed by him. Keaton, whose death at 79 was reported on Saturday, was an aspirational maverick, and her iconic fashion sense reflected that; no matter what music she was hearing, the drumbeat was her own. You wanted to be her.
“Reds” came at a career inflection point for Keaton. Her previous film, the 1979 comedy “Manhattan,” would be the last with Allen for a long while, and in 1978 she had become romantically involved with Beatty. He directed, produced, co-wrote and starred in “Reds,” which follows the life and career of the radical journalist and activist John (Jack) Reed from about 1915 to 1920.
Keaton plays Louise Bryant, a writer who left her marriage and life in Portland, Ore., to join Reed in Greenwich Village. Through their tumultuous relationship, the pair reported on revolutions and wars and were involved in socialist and Communist politics. It’s a long, thrilling, romantic film about idealism and disappointment and love and war, and it also stars Jack Nicholson as the playwright Eugene O’Neill, with whom Bryant had an affair, as well as Maureen Stapleton as the anarchist writer and activist Emma Goldman.
You could say that Bryant was in keeping with the Diane Keaton “type,” and you wouldn’t be wrong. A lot of Bryant and Reed’s tumult comes from trying to navigate the shape their relationship will really take. On the one hand, they’re radicals who believe, at least in the abstract, in ideals like free love, equality and nonconformity. When Bryant arrives in Greenwich Village, she’s ready to be a “real” writer, and has little interest in acting like “a wife” ever again. Conventional American life is not for her.
But it’s also the 1910s, and Bryant, fresh out of Portland, is not quite ready for what that means. After cursory questioning — “What is it you do?” they keep asking her, and she seems unprepared to answer beyond “I write” — Reed’s circle dismisses Bryant as a lightweight, just another one of “Jack’s women.”
This is where you can start to see what Keaton’s doing with the role. “Reds” is a long movie in which Bryant goes through serious transformation. Of all the characters, her evolution is the most striking, and Keaton’s performance has to tiptoe along a thin edge. Bryant is vulnerable because she is a woman in a world of men who say they believe in equality but are still conditioned to discount most women, especially any who present themselves with femininity — and Bryant’s style, though culturally unconventional for the time, is still feminine, with soft hair and ethereal beauty. Set next to Goldman, who is brusque and forceful, she is easier to sweep aside; she knows it, and it frustrates her.
Bryant is also vulnerable because she is in love with Reed, and even when she is angry with him, she is tied to him, and he to her. But that is not always something she’s happy about. In one scene just before intermission — that’s how long it is! — she watches him address a crowd, and you can see in Keaton’s face flickers of every emotion: pride, love, jealousy, resignation, frustration and a bit of awe. She is aware that she is second fiddle to her charismatic and mesmerizing partner (he is, after all, played by Beatty). She might want to be the great writer she believes herself capable of being. But she also knows, if push comes to shove, she’s going to set herself aside for this man, not the other way around.
Yet she does become more independent and takes control of her own career, while also growing more weary and saddened, holding in all of that tension. “Reds” is a story of idealism that is met with the full force of historical realism, and while ostensibly Reed is the main character, it’s really Bryant who has to live out the full story: She encounters Reed’s beliefs, lives alongside them, lets them change her and then has to live with the consequences after the heroics have run their course.
That’s why her dramatic performance is so remarkable in the movie, and probably why so often Beatty lets the camera follow her, not Reed, through the most dramatic scenes. In one of the most stirring sequences, Bryant is looking for Reed on a train that’s pulled into a station. She does not look like any Keaton we know. She looks exhausted, her eyes enormous and skin pale, her hair unruly and gathered into a kerchief.
She walks to the train and simply watches as men get off, one by one. Not one of them is Reed. Her face barely changes expression, somewhere between fear and a tiny hint of hope, a tiny shake of her head whenever a man who might have been Reed turns out to be someone else. She spots a body being carried away on a stretcher, covered in a red blanket and seems almost certain that it must be him.
But as she turns to watch the body, she spots Reed in the distance and he sees her. The expression on her face barely changes as she starts to walk toward him, and it is only when her face is buried in his shoulder, and his in hers, that any tears can slip out.
As the emotional core of the movie, Keaton’s performance in “Reds” is the bridge for the audience: We might not all be Reed, the charismatic idealist giving speeches, but we might be Bryant, just trying to catch hold as history barrels past and discovering who we are inside of it. She becomes strong, but that also means some thick calluses, and Keaton gives us a woman who has to build up all that armor herself.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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