Movie Review
Che
4 of 5 stars
After sitting through the first part of Steven Soderbergh's massive biopic of the world's most famous iconic misunderstood overrated and wrongly-vilified (all at the same time) revolutionary I have just a few rhetorical questions to ask.
First with Benicio del Toro in as the leading man" could any movie be more perfectly cast than ""Che?""
Then" has any panoramic take on a larger-than-life figure been more successfully directed by a more improbable schmuck than Soderbergh?
And finally when dear God is the second part of this film coming to town?
For those already familiar with the details of Che's life as a revolutionary (a number which decreases in inverse proportion to the number of hipsters wearing his face on T-shirts) this movie provides the imagination for events that could never have been documented.
In many ways the film allows us to see and experience what before we could only merely know.
To correct this discrepancy Soderbergh shoots his film in a cinéma vérité style that complements the revolution it depicts.
Its story is at once too Spartan to be Hollywood glamour and too magically unthinkable to be a true documentary.
So instead the film falls somewhere in between which ironically for this man who is nowhere near the middle is exactly where it should be.
If you're wondering how a ragtag group of fewer than 100 doctors lawyers and partisans could start a rebellion from a leaky 12-man yacht and build it into a movement that overthrew a corrupt government backed by some of the Western hemisphere's most powerful agricultural corporations then this movie has all of your answers.
The scenes of Che's rather sanguinary defense of military executions may be a bone thrown to the conservative critics of fellow travelling Hollywood types (and to be fair the historical record) but it is his musings on revolutionary love that get us closest to the real Che: the physician-guerrilla.
This is a role Benicio del Toro was born for. He fits it like a puzzle piece.
He has the handsome face of an iconic and populist swashbuckler which is Guevara the shell but he also has the ability to carry himself as an aloof theorist of communist revolution which is Guevara the seed.
When he scores a military victory (which he did often) he is not a hero and when he delivers strict revolutionary discipline to wayward rebels he is not a villain.
He is a man not an airbrushed poster but even men need a little powder before American TV interviews sometimes.
Just ask Che. Or del Toro. After this movie the two might be fused in your mind.
Conservatives and Cuban ex-pats will probably rend their political mantles because Soderbergh based much of the plot on Guevara's own reflections on his time as a guerrilla.
But to do this would be as foolish as treating the movie as a fluff piece.
Soderbergh knew to avoid that" and only extremely rarely does he dip into his ""Ocean's 11"" style editing.
This is not a frantic or triumphant movie. Its mood is" above all somber.
It is a Caribbean twilight — heavy sultry and soft — for a man who was only two of these things.
Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu
