THERE IS A DREAM--somewhat masochistic--of liberal upper-and middle-class boys, about traveling to the ends of the earth to fight for justice, becoming swallowed up by events, and dying a hero, dying in the arms of the beautiful, maternal woman who has followed along--a beautiful woman who weeps and cradles her man like a precious flower that has withered in the heat. This image, and the tender portrait of reconciliation on the posters, is the mushy and affecting core of Warren Beatty's Reds, a movie bereft of political ideology and ultimately uninterested in the Russian Revolution. It's about a rich Harvard boy with big dreams--an armchair socialist--who gets in over his head in a strange land, an artist who tried desperately to be a politician and got himself crucified. And it's about the woman who loves him but cannot save him.

Cool and detached on the surface, framed by imperfect reminiscences by the gloriously withered contemporaries of John Reed '10 and Louise Bryant, Reds is a soft sell. It gets by with the hoariest cliches of Hollywood romances by understating them, and by distracting the audience with small matters like a revolutionary war. This is an epic without scope: intelligent, ironic, and ultimately unambitious, despite the $30-million price tag and a nation of Finnish extras. And it perfectly reflects the interests and temperament of its director, co-scenarist and star, Warren Beatty.

It's old hat to charge Beatty with vanity and egomania, and a little misleading. He is actually Hollywood's softest, most self-effacing romantic romantic actor. Even playing macho-tough, as in Bonnie and Clyde or McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he's careful to show the boyish vulnerability underneath. Small-scale and unaggressive, he can't sustain a picture alone, so he surrounds himself with high-voltage actors and situations, and he counts on the audience to look to him for relief. In John Reed, Beatty found a figure ideally suited to his own quiet narcissism--a modern saint, political innocent and martyr. And, rounding the character slightly by showing his insensitivity to others, "You love yourself; you fuck me" brays Diane Keaton) Beatty gives a smart, delicate performance, sleepy but cognizant, doggedly pursuing his ideals while the world blows up around him.

The film is subtly shot from Reed's point of view--staring after his wife as she charges down the stairs, moving in on a rally--and when the camera turns on him it gazes with the dewy eyes of a cheerleader. Beatty and his co-writer, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, have clearly done heaps of research on the politics of the period, but they have buried it all in the film's margins and between the lines; they use the Russian Revolution and leftist ideology to add texture, while dramatically the film is shaped entirely by the love story. When Louise (Diane Keaton) lures Beatty to her apartment for an interview, and he proceeds to lecture her on his causes till dawn, we hear nothing but a few liberal buzzwords and phrases; what's supposed to register is Reed's passion--that he could talk all night about politics!--and Bryant's dazed awe. And later, in Russia, when Reed finds himself on a platform exhorting the Communists to strike and promising the support of the American workers, the climax of the scene is not the workers' cheering, but the proud, loving gaze of the hitherto frigid Louise. "She'll sleep with him now," we think, and sure enough, Beatty cuts to coitus in silhouette, Keaton on top.

Where did you go on your honeymoon?

Some people respond to the romance; I find it thin. Bryant snappily seduces Reed by telling him she'd like to see him with his pants off, and soon enough she's arguing with him about being treated like a wife. They're a couple before we know it, and they're dissolving before we see what kept them together. This is no doubt deliberate--a modern, detached paradigm of "bohemian" relationships, all that petty squabbling and navel-gazing. Only in the second half of the movie, when they have no scenes together, do we become emotionally involved in their relationship. The Soviets cancel Reed's travel plans, the Finns throw him in prison, and Bryant makes her long, surreptitious trek across snowy landscapes and gazes out longingly over icy lakes. We want to see that teary embrace so badly that by the time we get there Beatty's got us; he takes his time and actually decrescendoes before they spot each other. The scene is exquisite; not a proverbial dry eye in the proverbial house.

The sentimentality glows against the chilliness of the script, and I assume the chill is Griffiths'. It's easy to tell that an Englishman had a hand in the dialogue, since much of it is in their Front Page-filtered notion of how Americans, particularly journalists, talk--the hardboiled, crackerjack repartee. Neither nor Beatty nor Griffiths has the emotional equipment as writers to give Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson)--who has an affair with Bryant when Reed is at a convention--the raging, messy confessional speech he so obviously needs; and so O'Neill puts it in a letter which we never see. They keep Nicholson brooding in the shadows like a character in film noir, relying on our memories of his explosions in other films to know that he has it in him. Real blood-and-guts American rage and confession would expose the tasteful, arid Englishness of the Reed-Bryant quarrels and love scenes (although there's a lulu of a fight when she starts beating on his pretty face). Anyway, Nicholson is mesmerizing, playing O'Neill as a smug asshole. What other actor would have the courage to give a performance this dark and disgusting?

O'Neill is an unsparing realist; he's the one who points out that Reed is an artist, not a politician. Reed ends up defending the individual's right to dissent against the Party's call for unquestioning loyalty, exclaiming that if you purge dissent you purge what's unique in a man, and he's answered by a tremendous explosion that signals a White-army attack. That's a good, absorbing scene, one of a couple in the second half that pit idealist against politician. But they all have that Robert Bolt-Q.E.D. quality. Bolt's latest play; in fact, State of Revolution (1977) is an absorbing, overly tidy account of Leninism disfigured by and dissolving into Stalinism, and there are echoes of it all over Reds. Reed and Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton) see the dream smothered, and Reed asks, tragically, "What's life if we pull out now?"

DIANE KEATON has never looked as utterly lovely as she does against Vittorio Storaro's mahogany-toned cinematography, with that fragile, ivory face and luminous eyes framed by curly wisps of brown hair. But she gives another fraudulent performance, characterized by an enormous gap between her lines and her head. She comes complete with her own outtakes--we can practically hear them in the nervous, senseless way she rushes through a speech as if it were a tongue-twister. Every line in her Method-y delivery proclaims, "I've been through analysis," making her an aural, if not visual anachronism. (This is an era when Freud was still playing with little boys.) Keaton can't convey intellect the way Maureen Stapleton, in fine full figure and sturdy croak, can.

"For two radicals, you sure have a lot of middle-class ideals," sneers O'Neill, and nobody seems to disagree. Reds makes middle-class messianism glamorous. It isn't a bad film, and in an era when Ronald Reagan finds two Soviets in every Latin American garage and a Libyan in every pot, maybe a film about two lovely, decent people who also happen to be Marxists will restore some balance. Perhaps this is as much as we can realistically hope for from a mainstream Hollywood film by Warren Beatty. At least it points in the right (left) direction and makes having a social conscience fashionable again. But fashion is fickle, and Reds' underlying conservatism and drippy romanticism are hardly what we need now. Burn the armchairs!