Steven Soderbergh's Che

The Argentine and The Guerrilla (both exactly 131 minutes long in the version that screened at the New York Film Festival, slightly shorter than the Cannes cut) constantly rhyme with each other, commenting on the other film and deepening its meaning. Reminiscent of the echoing halves of the Star Wars cycle, narrative moments keep returning under different circumstances, with different outcomes. In Part I, Che turns two sixteen-year-old volunteer guerrillas away but relents when they convince him of their worth. In Part II, he makes a dire mistake by trusting another pair of youthful fighters too readily -- and we know exactly why.

I will have to see the film again to attempt a complete list of telling cross-references, but thanks of Soderbergh's mirroring structure, many of the myriad factors that led to success in Cuba and failure in Bolivia come into clear relief even on first viewing: the availability or absence of local support, trustworthy and reliable comrades, a politicized populace, assistance from urban movements, propaganda, weapons, food, shelter, the intervention of CIA advisers, and favorable terrain. Che is, among other things, a study in the art, practice, and history of guerrilla warfare. At the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening, Soderbergh argued that Cuba was the last time this kind of revolution was possible, and Che illustrates this with an extraordinarily attention to detail.

But there is more to be gleaned from the push-and-pull of the film's two halves. Somewhat like Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy, Che attempts the same story once as action flick and once as gritty chronicle of defeat. The Argentine and The Guerrilla belong to different genres, and the juxtaposition between the rousing spectacle and the clammy tragedy sheds a telling light on our expectations: you can't avoid the creeping suspicion that, if Soderbergh had left his RED camera prototype on the wide-screen setting and turned up the saturation, Che might have succeeded in Bolivia after all.

Most curious, of course, is the fulcrum at the center of Che, the one thing that never changes during the movie's four-and-a-half-hour journey from the bow of the Granma to the stretcher tied to a helicopter: its main character's fierce determination. In a bravura performance that breathes breathes passion and empathy, Benicio del Toro gives the Argentine doctor an iron will that is articulated in scene after scene -- whether he drags himself up a jungle incline in the wheezing throes of an asthma attack, turns around a looted car on the way to Havana, or delivers a fiery speech at the United Nations.

Unlike Todd Haynes' mutant Dylan biopic I'm Not There, which explored the world of its iconic hero through a series of fragmented approximations from the inside out, Che approaches his subject from the outside. We first see Che in bits and pieces -- a cheek, a cigar, a boot -- and Soderbergh avoids the ingratiating close-ups and broad, conveniently staged moments that summarize characters in lesser biopics that, for all their life-spanning inclusiveness, often obscure the very thing that make their subjects interesting in the first place.

Soderbergh's method doesn't infer or indicate. Instead, he focuses his attention on the precise specifics of what Guevara did -- the nuts and bolts planning of his revolutionary campaigns, the training, teaching, building of shelters, cleaning of guns, shucking of corn, laying of ambushes, treating of the wounded, the ways in which he dealt with volunteers, deserters, traitors, farmers, friends, and enemies. We see him gain confidence, suffer, and triumph. We see him lay his head in his wife's (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lap before leaving for Bolivia; we see him reason with his executioners.

As Soderbergh made clear, the filmmaker is no communist, and "there's no place for me in Che's perfect society. Che would have hated me." But regardless of his disagreement with Guevara's violent methods and his economic policies, Soderbergh said that he admired the iconic revolutionary's unwavering determination to fight oppression and exploitation. By providing a painstaking portrait of Guevara's work, its challenges and its price, Soderbergh allows Che's motivations and emotions to emerge, rarely declared but always movingly evident.

Che: The Argentine / The Guerrilla (2008)
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Benjamin Bratt, Franka Potente, Lou Diamond Phillips, Julia Ormond, Matt Damon
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Running Time: 4 hr. 22 min.
Release Date: December, 2008 (limited) / January 2009
Distributors: IFC Films