This is a tremendous movie that people of all political stripes should see. Until I saw this movie, Warren Beatty has always come across to me as your basic Hollywood liberal -- elitist without reason and in possession of values at war with those of most of his countrymen. And given the subject matter of this biopic, I fully expected it to be a glorification of Reed's life. It's anything but, though Reed is the movie's protagonist.
What it is, by contrast, is primarily the love story between Reed and Bryant. Given the leftist ideas of free love, which the movie also explores, the very notion of a love story is anathema to the supposed political beliefs of the Bolsheviks and those in the American and European left. The notion of love and self-sacrifice were denigrated by the left as bourgeois concepts. Hammering my point home, O'Neill at one point even accuses Bryant of cynically pretending to be about free love to win a marriage proposal from Reed. Within the context of the movie, that's probably unfair. Bryant thought she was about free love until she met Reed. Reed thought he was about free love until he met Bryant and until Bryant gave herself to O'Neill.
What the moviegoer should conclude from all of this is is that the left-wing notion of free love is empirically unsustainable and bankrupt as an idea. At the end of the movie, just before Reed dies (or just before Bryant learns Reed dies), she drops a cup she was taking to get him some water, as he lay on his death bed. A small boy picks the cup up and hands it to Bryant. The boy, perhaps 4 years old, returns to his seat, smiling at Bryant. Earlier in the movie, when Reed was diagnosed with kidney disease, he asked his doctor if that would affect his ability to have children (the answer was "no"). The closing scene with the boy is meant to call that to mind. In other words, after all of his trials, Bryant sees the child, and the moviegoer gets the message -- Reed and Bryant have effectively wasted their lives. They've wasted their lives (more Reed than Bryant) striving for their beliefs, which in the end turn out to have been painfully naive. What they missed were multiple years in which they could have been together in bourgeois happiness. (The movie repeatedly shows Reed and Bryant's happiest moments as being precisely those where they were together, in America, living a middle class or lower middle class life -- making dinner, playing with their dog, or making love.) And what they missed because of Reed's misplaced revolutionary fervor was the opportunity to have children and raise a family together. In short, they missed the basic point of life, and only realized it too late.
As an aside, I didn't expect this from Beatty, one of Hollywood's most notorious womanizers. But I think what it shows is that he was a romantic at heart all along. And given that he's still married to Annette Benning, after lots of profound public expressions of love -- which at the time I discounted as so much Hollywood showboating -- I think Beatty just found the one he was searching for. The right has its lotharios, like the left, and it's easy to understand a handsome man with a strong libido chasing so many skirts. The point is that eventually Beatty did settle down. I think the denunciations of his by many of his former lovers is because they wanted to be "the one," but only late in his life did Ms. Benning get his heart.
What it is, by contrast, is primarily the love story between Reed and Bryant. Given the leftist ideas of free love, which the movie also explores, the very notion of a love story is anathema to the supposed political beliefs of the Bolsheviks and those in the American and European left. The notion of love and self-sacrifice were denigrated by the left as bourgeois concepts. Hammering my point home, O'Neill at one point even accuses Bryant of cynically pretending to be about free love to win a marriage proposal from Reed. Within the context of the movie, that's probably unfair. Bryant thought she was about free love until she met Reed. Reed thought he was about free love until he met Bryant and until Bryant gave herself to O'Neill.
What the moviegoer should conclude from all of this is is that the left-wing notion of free love is empirically unsustainable and bankrupt as an idea. At the end of the movie, just before Reed dies (or just before Bryant learns Reed dies), she drops a cup she was taking to get him some water, as he lay on his death bed. A small boy picks the cup up and hands it to Bryant. The boy, perhaps 4 years old, returns to his seat, smiling at Bryant. Earlier in the movie, when Reed was diagnosed with kidney disease, he asked his doctor if that would affect his ability to have children (the answer was "no"). The closing scene with the boy is meant to call that to mind. In other words, after all of his trials, Bryant sees the child, and the moviegoer gets the message -- Reed and Bryant have effectively wasted their lives. They've wasted their lives (more Reed than Bryant) striving for their beliefs, which in the end turn out to have been painfully naive. What they missed were multiple years in which they could have been together in bourgeois happiness. (The movie repeatedly shows Reed and Bryant's happiest moments as being precisely those where they were together, in America, living a middle class or lower middle class life -- making dinner, playing with their dog, or making love.) And what they missed because of Reed's misplaced revolutionary fervor was the opportunity to have children and raise a family together. In short, they missed the basic point of life, and only realized it too late.
As an aside, I didn't expect this from Beatty, one of Hollywood's most notorious womanizers. But I think what it shows is that he was a romantic at heart all along. And given that he's still married to Annette Benning, after lots of profound public expressions of love -- which at the time I discounted as so much Hollywood showboating -- I think Beatty just found the one he was searching for. The right has its lotharios, like the left, and it's easy to understand a handsome man with a strong libido chasing so many skirts. The point is that eventually Beatty did settle down. I think the denunciations of his by many of his former lovers is because they wanted to be "the one," but only late in his life did Ms. Benning get his heart.