Steven Soderbergh’s four-hundred-and-seventeen-minute film, Che, is actually two films—for some viewers it might be one too many films, but then I suppose there are people who think one can eat too much chocolate cake. Appetites must be fed.

An experiment in form, Che is unlike the usual film biography: less achievement-oriented like Gandhi or Milk and more a director’s vision like the two Capote films, Infamous and Capote. Oddly, for a movie about such an incendiary individual as Che Guevera, the opposition (and the support) surrounding the film has been mostly muted; since its initial screening at Cannes last May the picture has been received rather flatly. I can see why. It is not a strict linear history. Che, Part One begins in the early 1950's in Cuba with Batista’s announcement of his overthrow of the government, and in Mexico City with Che meeting Castro to discuss the overthrow of Batista, and ends with the guerrillas’ victory, in January, 1959—but Soderbergh abruptly ends the movie one hundred and eighty-eight miles from Havana, thus denying the audience any sense of the victory march.

Part Two opens with Che surreptitiously entering Bolivia, in 1967, where he attempts to use guerrilla-style tactics to reprise the Cuban model of socialism. (He was eventually captured and executed by the Bolivian army, with help from a Cuban CIA operative.) Yet neither is Che a dramatization of Che’s life in the typical Hollywood genius/freak style of A Beautiful Mind. We do not learn much about him; we are left with a greater sense of the asthma that wore him down than of his intellectual self-education, or what Castro thought of him for leaving Cuba to carry on the ideals of la revolución. The picture pitches back and forth, from country to country and from time-frame to time-frame. The iconic eponymous title is all that is straightforward about the movie.

Soderbergh, in turning away from the traditional film biography, poses several questions that reach beyond Guevera. Che is as much a movie about a revolutionary in film as it is about a revolutionary in politics; if the picture is more fascinating for its aesthetic contradictions in Soderbergh’s career than for its portrait of Che that is not entirely a contradiction in itself. By now, Che’s afterlife has lasted longer than his life—he died at thirty-nine—so any interpretation about him is available, somewhat like a novel that enters into the public domain after its copyright expires. The movie, written by Peter Buchman and Benjamin Van Der Veen, represents Che as a revolutionary model, but less like the HBO John Adams mini-series that shows the man behind the leader than a film like Lawrence of Arabia, where David Lean focuses on Lawrence as a self-styled freedom fighter without delving into his past or his personal side.

Che, played to perfection by Benicio Del Toro, at times appears to be the director’s alter ego, though never as extravagantly as Lean made Peter O’Toole’s sun-burnished Lawrence. Del Toro’s Che dresses in his trademark olive-green fatigues and beret, and he rarely raises his voice, which gives his portrayal a touch of Jesus. But Soderbergh and the writers give Del Toro no grandstanding scene, no Oscar moment; rather, his performance is all of a piece: low-keyed, cool, watchful. The audience is left to extrapolate his strengths and weaknesses, which is where some critics have, I think, felt amiss. The real Che, like Lenin, oversaw many executions and there are a couple shown here, but not in high fashion—does that mean Soderbergh feels the violence is permissible, or that its absence onscreen keeps Che clean? Well, if one knows Guevera was no boy scout, the acknowledgement of his swift decisions is evident but not weighted extra. Soderbergh keeps his camera rolling.

The two halves of the movie reflect a revolutionary’s life; at times, Che affects a documentary air. Scenes of him discussing troop movements, parsing guerrilla conduct, helping the peasants (Che trained as a doctor), all come and go without much directorial interference. When the Bolivian government and Che’s ragtag guerrilla army are targeting each other in Part Two, the way in which both sides seek to manipulate the peasants for food and for information is depicted dryly. It is also another way for Soderbergh to create an ambiguous interpretation; if he wished to crown Che, he would not show the revolutionary in any kind of bad light. Che’s determinism underplays everything else about him without making excuses for his ruthlessness.

Soderbergh is at his most expressive at the very end, after Che’s capture when he is trussed and left dirty and weather-beaten in a shed; as he begins to woo a young guard into freeing him we see how charismatic Che truly was. In an earlier scene, after he has met some young recruits in the middle of nowhere and a lieutenant tells them, “You’ve just shaken hands with Che Guevera,” one young man says, “Can I shake his hand again?” At the end, the young guard is equally susceptible to Che’s myth, but breaks away and tells the other guard he will have to stand watch. Soderbergh inverts the usual film-bio defeat-to-victory progression, which, again, says more about his viewpoint as a filmmaker than anything about Che’s methods as a revolutionary. He scotches the victory lap most films end on (like the endless candlelight vigil in Milk). There are no end-titles bringing us up to date about Che’s legacy, the way biographical films do; indeed, Soderbergh omits the real ending—Che’s hands were cut off and his corpse buried anonymously, so there would be no grave to create a pilgrimage for his followers—thus the full dramatic curve is stopped short. All we see of Che is what Soderbergh sees in his camera.

Directors have often fallen under the sway of politics: there is something romantic about the larger-than-life character that changes the world. Eisenstein’s two-part Ivan the Terrible, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, Bertolucci’s five-hour 1900 and his Chinese epic The Last Emperor, Abel Gance’s split-screen Napoléon and Lean’s swashbuckling Middle Eastern drama all try to match the director’s vision to the leader’s luminous spirit. (Kubrick’s unfulfilled dream to make a film about Napoleon says more about him than about the French Emperor.) Audiences come away from these personal epics with a sense of heightened drama, though not necessarily all the facts, as if emotion is enough. (Sometimes, it is, as in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, where Henry Fonda makes Lincoln human.)  Soderbergh never sets up his film as any sort of authorized Life, which makes Che, despite its running time, a compact epic. It might not be the movie we expect about Che, but it is the kind of unexpected movie from Soderbergh that we hope for. After all, we need a revolution in the movies, too.


Che, Part One and Part Two
opens at the Tivoli Cinemas,
Westport Square, on February 27.
There will be a ten-minute intermission between films.
For tickets and showtimes, 913-383-7756 or online at www.tivolikc.com.

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

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