Che
Why Che Guevara and why now? Who in 2009 could be interested in a four-hour movie on the minutiae of guerrilla warfare?
The Motorcycle Diaries and the long-ago failure Che! were made to capitalize on the Guevara myth; each, in its way, served to infuriate either Che’s enemies or his fans. By contrast, Steven Soderbergh’s Che is neither romantic nor particularly partisan. Whatever heat star and co-producer Benicio Del Toro brings to the title role, Soderbergh’s project is to search for the technocrat — which is to say, himself — in the original revolutionary rock star.
Throughout Che, the emphasis is on process. The movie presents its subject almost entirely in the context of three events: the Cuban Revolution, the Bolivian debacle and a 1964 trip to the United Nations. At the Cannes Film Festival last May, some accused Soderbergh and co-screenwriter Peter Buchman of evading the facts: Where was Che’s bureaucratic bungling and his persecution of political enemies? What about his love affairs? His adventures in the Congo? Why did Soderbergh withhold the ecstatic entrance into Havana? Everything must be deduced from Che’s behavior under actual or rhetorical fire — he is defined in terms of his desire and capacity to make history.
I considered Che perhaps a great movie and certainly an admirably uncommercial one. Upon a second viewing months later, after Soderbergh tweaked the first half to soften its strangeness, the movie seemed disappointingly less formally rigorous but even more scrupulous in its pursuit of an objective narrative. The filmmaker wanted to make history as well.
The man who took the “audience award” at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has whimsically alternated between big-budget crowd-pleasers and pretentious, scruffy experiments. Traffic came closest to reconciling these modes, but Che does as well. The movie’s first part has a classic Hollywood look, while the second is more rough-and-ready cinema vérité. In his interviews, Soderbergh has emphasized his use of a new lightweight, high-performance digital cine-camera to shoot Che, setting up, as critic Amy Taubin noted in Film Comment, an underlying equation between guerrilla warfare and guerrilla filmmaking.
Does this trivialize the movie’s subject? Only to the degree that making art is making a lesser form of history. Che gives full reign to a quixotic strain of Soderbergh’s work — the desire to use Franz Kafka as a fictional character, to remake Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris or, as in The Good German, to create a ’40s movie in the 21st century. Ocean’s 11 is both a caper movie and a successfully pulled caper; Solaris is a movie about the imperfection of simulated memory that is also such a memory.
Assuming responsibility for this ambitious, risk-taking and possibly pointless project gave Soderbergh a means to identify with his impossibly legendary subject.
Soderbergh’s strategy demands that the viewer project a measure of pathos into Che — or at least an appreciation for the painful failure dramatized onscreen.
Che might be described as an anti-biopic that nevertheless seeks to humanize its subject with a shocking absence of human interest.
Whatever Soderbergh’s intentions, Che is most definitely not a movie in the hyper-dramatizing tradition of D.W. Griffith or Steven Spielberg (or, for that matter, Milk). History is not personalized.
At its best, Che is both action film and ongoing argument. Each new camera setup seeks to introduce a specific idea — about Che or his situation — and every choreographed battle sequence is a sort of algorithm where the camera attempts to inscribe the event that is being enacted.
Che‘s two parts are best seen together. Part Two may be the more realized and could certainly stand on its own, but it’s only comprehensible in the light of Part One. Elevating Part Two to tragedy, Part One puts some hope in hopelessness — and even in history.
