Warren peace
Liberal Hollywood gets a Beat(ty)down

IT'S SAID THAT in Hollywood a social conscience and $4.75 will get you a latte, if not a lot else. Even so, a long tradition of socially conscious, left-wing filmmaking in Hollywood continues in fits and starts to this day. Warren Beatty, this year's recipient of the San Francisco International Film Festival's Akira Kurosawa Award, has made two films that fall squarely in this tradition, and it's not surprising they're both getting screenings to go with that imposing honor. Beatty is a long-standing liberal activist, once even briefly retiring from moviemaking to work on George McGovern's presidential campaign. All the more reason that Reds and Bulworth, the only overtly political films he's made, suggest the trajectory of the discontents of baby boomer liberalism as a whole, on its journey from counterculture to establishment.

Released in 1981, Reds breathed the lingering mountain air of the '60s at the dawn of Reagan's Morning in America. Beatty was casting back in history for a progenitor to the radical idealism of his own generation, and he landed not in the austere and culturally conservative 1930s but in the 1910s. Greenwich Village's colorful bohemian radicals, with their thoroughgoing revolt against convention and romantic individualism no doubt seemed the proper ancestors of his unbounded generation. Although stubbornly out of step with the times, Beatty's epic portrait of American communist John Reed brought him his only Oscar for directing and three other nominations for writing, acting, and producing. Of course, the heart of the picture is the love story between Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), but it takes its history seriously – evidenced by the brilliant use of interviews with real historical figures throughout. Its sympathetic treatment of American socialism and the Russian Revolution would be a bold stroke even today, with the cold war a rapidly receding memory.

In hindsight, Reds looks like the last gasp of the Democratic Party's left-wing faithful before they entered the fetid tunnel of the Reagan-Bush years. Meanwhile in Hollywood, only an occasional dyspeptic conspiracy theory from Oliver Stone varied the industry's diet of empty-headed escapism, as if the cultural concomitant to Reagan's perpetual morning was the empty nourishment of one long breakfast-cereal commercial. The unabashedly romantic radicalism celebrated in Reds disappeared. But the real betrayal for Beatty's generation of Democrats lay still ahead. These liberals, who in the 1980s held their noses and meanwhile joined the establishment, ended up with Bill Clinton and a neo-Democratic formula for maintaining power. This was not the party Beatty and other liberal Democrats had pined for during the dark ages of the Reagan-Bush era. Something had to be done.

I think it was James Agee who advised artists bent on critiquing a repressive age to play the age as comedy if they want to get away with it. Beatty applied the maxim with marked success in Bulworth, a terribly flawed film that nevertheless generated considerable buzz. Spurring debate when it premiered in 1998, it even inspired a testing of the waters for Beatty the maybe-candidate in the 2000 presidential election (the waters proved a little frigid). The film's title character, Sen. Jay Bulworth, played with zeal by Beatty, is an old '60s idealist who has long since succumbed to the logic of power, sitting comfortably in the deep pocket of big business. As the story opens, he despises what he has become and, in an imaginative version of campaign finance reform, uses some of that filthy lucre to take a contract out on himself. Suddenly, with nothing to lose, a manic Bulworth acts and speaks his mind where a politician really shouldn't and, under the spell of fly girl Nina (Halle Berry), who turns out to have been raised by '60s activists, raps his way to a Pyrrhic victory in the heart of South Central.

The notion that a Washington insider could salvage his humanity and energize the apathetic masses for a return to the Democratic Party of yesteryear by simply telling the truth is pure Capra. At the same time, Bulworth proved far more biting than the embarrassing pleas for a kinder, gentler commander in chief in 1993's Dave (which substitutes a nice guy look-alike for an uptight prez) or 1995's The American President (which uses new girlfriend Annette Bening to take the neo-Democratic edge off president Michael Douglas). These daydreams imagine the solution to the country's problems in the emotional health of the patriarch, or in "getting dad to be like his old self." Primary Colors and Wag the Dog, which appeared at about the same time, hold themselves aloof from a particular platform. Bulworth's political message, while more realistic, is a familiar one: the corruption of government by corporate power demands reform. Equally significant, in Bulworth's racial cross-dressing and romance with Nina the film understands the racial divide as an artificial product of a class system. But in making both those points, Bulworth reveals a good deal of the paternalism in the old liberal agenda.

Reds retains the energy of an oppositional politics that Bulworth's anachronistic liberalism largely sacrifices to intraparty squabbles. Significantly, the heroes of both films end up martyrs (who says Americans don't dream of martyrdom?). But, in the historical progression made famous by Marx, the first time it's tragedy; the second time, farce. This makes Bulworth pessimistic and at odds with the otherwise unambiguous celebration of humanist values and political commitment in both films. After all, it's the anarchist Emma Goldman (memorably portrayed by Maureen Stapleton), not Lenin or Trotsky, who's the conscience of Reds. That film's independence comes closer in spirit to the current moment of the American left than Bulworth, released one year before Seattle. Bulworth limits itself by only imagining change from within the system. Reds, in identifying with a real revolutionary, distills the essential idealism of a generation yet to become the establishment and sees things from the outside. Beatty, as a loyal Democrat, may have voted for Clinton anyway in 1996. The filmmaker reminds us that John Reed last cast his vote for a Democrat in 1916, gambling on Woodrow Wilson to keep the United States out of the war. He lost, but learned to think outside the box. (Robert Avila)

Bulworth screens Wed/24, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki; Reds screens before the presentation of the Akira Kurosawa Award and is followed by an onstage interview with Warren Beatty Fri/26, 7 p.m., Kabuki 8. For more information see box, page 33.