‘Che’: It’s a Long Story

During last night’s post-screening press conference for “Che,” the two-part, 268-minute film based on the life of Ernesto “Che” Guevara that makes its debut at the New York Film Festival on October 7, the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, addressed a fundamental irony at the heart of his ambitious and technically polished new project. Though Che Guevara dedicated his life to fomenting Marxist revolution intended to abolish capitalism, the Argentine physician-guerrilla’s name and image have helped to sell, in Mr. Soderbergh’s words, “a wall of books” and other commercial goods branded with the revolutionary’s likeness. Mr. Soderbergh expressed the hope that his film, not the easiest sell to mainstream audiences, would bear some of the same branded commercial heft.If only the director and his executive producer and star, Benicio Del Toro, were trying to market the film 40 years ago. Ostensibly a two-part military saga boasting multiple lengthy combat sequences on either side of an intermission, “Che” (which will be released in some foreign markets as two stand-alone films, “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”) plays very much like one of the “road-show” historical epics that so enthralled American movie audiences around the same time the real Che Guevara came to New York to address the United Nations in 1964.The first half of “Che” introduces Guevara on the same fateful evening that he meets his future brother-in-arms Fidel Castro. Along with a company of some 80 men, Guevara and Castro clandestinely travel to the latter’s native Cuba in 1956 to begin the bloody and treacherous business of deposing dictator Fulgencio Batista. The geographical foundation necessary to follow the pair and their growing army of guerrillas, drawn from Cuba’s exploited peasant class, is laid out at the start by an animated map that would not have been out of place setting up Christian vs. Roman conflicts in one of Samuel Bronston’s Spanish-produced epics of the mid-1960s. In a bid to fill in personal background, Mr. Soderbergh also dramatizes a series of press interviews and private moments during Guevara’s 1964 New York trip in a black-and-white pseudo-documentary style that sharply (and literally) contrasts the lush wide-screen visuals featured in the rest of the film’s first half.Mr. Soderbergh and his screenwriters, Peter Buchman and Benjamin van der Veen, soft-play Guevara’s hard-core political ideology in favor of a more epic, genre-friendly depiction, via a road of tribulations encountered in the jungle march to Havana, of his personal growth as a leader and a purpose-driven individual. In much the way that Forest Whitaker became the means by which Clint Eastwood skirted the sordid details of Charlie Parker’s drug addiction in “Bird,” Mr. Del Toro invests Guevara with a winning and historically dubious innocence and patience that background Guevara’s virulently Marxist and pro-Soviet dogma, and harsh approach to military discipline. Guevara exhibits a kind of dawning fatherly remove with his troops and spouts generalized observations about social economics that wouldn’t need much whitewashing to be espoused on NPR.In lieu of a history lesson, we get a character study that agreeably swells to epic dimension during sustained sequences of combat, particularly the climactic attack in Santa Clara, Bolivia. Mr. Soderbergh bucks the prevailing trend of shooting vintage combat sequences with the streaky, strobing look that Steven Spielberg introduced in “Saving Private Ryan” and that has since become a visual cliché. As envisioned by Mr. Soderbergh, the battle of Santa Clara is, in fact, such an old-school cinematic enterprise that it even includes a train derailment and an attack right out of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.”Though the second half of “Che” begins on a James Bond-ish note, with a staged disappearance of Guevara and his 1967 infiltration (in disguise) of Bolivia, it soon transforms into variations on the theme of John Ford’s 1934 “The Lost Patrol.” Tasked with reaching striking miners in the Bolivian hills in the hope of establishing a stronghold from which to transform South America into a worker’s paradise, Guevara and a handful of compadres from the Cuban campaign fall prey to nearly every conceivable circumstantial catastrophe en route to an inevitable confrontation with the Bolivian army. The battle seems as fateful and final as the one that Robert Redford and the late Paul Newman dramatized in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”In lieu of the wide-screen, close-up epic remove employed during Part 1, Part 2 of “Che” is staged in a narrower aspect ratio and shot (by Mr. Soderbergh himself, as is the entire film) almost entirely in tight handheld frames. Both halves of the film represent yeoman efforts by all concerned to create engaging, emotionally honest filmmaking on what was reportedly an extremely modest budget with relatively few shooting days. Like the road-show epics of yore, “Che” contains stirring moments, brutal ironies, and sentimental epiphanies in just rapid enough succession that audiences won’t leave the theater wishing for the four hours of their lives back.Yet, as Mr. Buchman has said, “Whenever you have to condense time, you start distorting history.” “Che” makes for a good, though ultimately somber, day at the movies, but one still has the sense that four-and-a-half-hours is not nearly sufficient to cover more than a small part of Che Guevara’s life and times. The distortions of history reflected by “Che” are, therefore, of a fun-house-mirror magnitude.

‘Che’: It’s a Long Story

‘Che’: It’s a Long Story

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