Warren Beatty makes you wait so long for it that it feels like a cloud of emotion opening after a drought. We’re three hours into his masterpiece Reds, one of the five best films of the 1980s, and the former fashion plate and New York journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) is now dressed like a woebegone Russian laborer as she drifts through a Moscow train station in 1920 searching for her husband John (Jack) Reed (Warren Beatty). The last time we saw Jack, he was getting fired upon in Azerbaijan by White Forces who didn’t want to be subsumed by Bolshevik Russia. Neither Louise nor the audience knows whether he survived the attack.
In the last couple of years, Reed has lost a kidney, been jailed in Finland, suffered scurvy, and been informed he is effectively a prisoner of the Bolsheviks because the movement needs his propaganda gifts. Bryant, for her part, is shown using her connection with the former merchant seaman Eugene O’Neill to obtain a nausea-inducing place in the grubby hold of a ship bound from New York to Norway, then crossing the last miles of Finland the only way available — on skis.
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