Based on the diaries of Che Guevara, Steven Soderberg’s two-part film brings the man to life
By Elise Nakhnikian
WHEN someone makes a movie about a figure as polarizing as Che Guevara, you have to wonder why. Watching director Steven Soderberg and star/co-producer Benicio Del Toro on YouTube doing the publicity dance won’t tell you much. “I was interested in Che as a warrior, Che as a guy who has an ideology who picked up a gun,” was the closest Soderbergh came to committing to an answer after one December screening.
But this scrupulously unsensational movie doesn’t need a PR campaign to make its case. Soderbergh, Del Toro and screenwriter Peter Buchman clearly admire Che, who comes off as a deeply caring, charismatic man who loves Latin America’s campesinos and hates the repressive class and political systems that keep them mired in poverty, ignorance and fear.
He’s also a by-any-means-necessary revolutionary, convinced you can topple repressive regimes only by force. This two-part, four-hour-plus epic zooms in on how Che waged his campaigns, teasing apart the threads to look at why his tactics worked so well in Cuba and failed so dismally elsewhere. As the often hand-held camera follows Che and his men and occasional women through the jungles of Cuba and Bolivia, you get a stripped-down sense of how it may have felt to wage those particular revolutions.
It’s easy to see why Che haters are so worked up about this movie. For one thing, it focuses on the romanticized idealism of armed resistance to injustice, side-stepping the harder questions of how to rebuild and lead a nation. As Che himself says to one of his men at the end of Part 1, just after he’s helped Fidel Castro oust General Batista: “We just won the war. The revolution begins now.”
But the real problem for those who hate Castro and his commandante is the filmmakers’ evident admiration for their subject. They reclaim the idealized Che of all those T-shirts and posters, making him three-dimensional again. Their Che is never larger than life, but he is a great man and a lionhearted leader, unfailingly fair, patient, caring and capable. He joyfully sacrifices first his health (he suffered brutal asthma attacks in the jungle), then his life for the oppressed people of Latin America — not to mention giving up an apparently beloved wife and children and a potentially lucrative career as a doctor.
What’s more, he insists that his followers think for themselves. “A country that doesn’t know how to read and write is a country easy to deceive,” he says. This is the kind of father every struggling country needs.
And yet, he just wants to be one of the guys. Del Toro’s Che is quietly compelling, with a matter-of-fact directness and humor that goes a long way toward breaking down barriers between people — but some people even he can’t put at ease. Maybe that’s why he seems most at home in the jungle, reading one of his omnipresent books or joking with one of his men.
Soderbergh’s framing (the director shot the movie himself, and the cinematography is beautiful) also undercuts the usual Hollywood hero treatment, favoring group shots over close-ups and shooting all the rebels and peasants — Che included — in all their sweaty, unglamorous grunge.
Buchman chose his scenes wisely (the movie is based on Che’s diaries), using telling moments from the daily life of the camp to bring Che and his movement to life. Che’s and Fidel’s political and military strategies and the philosophies behind them are woven in deftly too, as Buchman uses things they said in interviews and speeches and avoids hokey proclamations.
Part 1 is the story of the Cuban revolution. We cut between 1964, in which Che is representing Cuba in the UN, and the months leading up to the revolution in the ‘50s. In the ‘60s, he’s engaged in a cat-and-mouse interview with an American journalist played by Julia Ormond, who exudes so much Mod-era cool her whole body seems to have been Botoxed.
Meanwhile, back in the ‘50s, Che sets up camp in the jungle, recruiting and training troops and winning the hearts and minds of the locals (he demonstrates what the revolution will bring by building a school, a printing press and a hospital) while Fidel (a convincingly commanding Demián Bichir) takes care of the big picture, cooking up strategy and forming allegiances with other rebel groups. It all builds to the final showdown, a gripping re-enactment of the battle of Santa Clara that feels as if it’s playing out in real time.
Part 2 starts almost a decade later. This time, Che is in charge, leading a campaign to overturn the Bolivian government. Once again he sets up camp in the jungle, but this time the locals are more suspicious and fearful, more prone to rat out the rebels. There’s also more infighting and mistrust among the rebels themselves, partly because many feel disrespected by the foreigners running their revolution (Che was from Argentina, and some of his right-hand men in Bolivia were Cubans.)
And there’s trouble from outside: The head of Bolivia’s Communist Party won’t cooperate with the rebels and the U.S. has sent military advisors to train a “special forces” division of the Bolivian Army.
If Part 1 is a feel-good story, Part 2 is a downer. Even the landscape in Bolivia is darker as Che and his steadily diminishing troops slog toward defeat. But the two are mirror images of the same story. Put together, like two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity, they point to an area you may want to explore.
Is a military coup the best way to bring down a repressive regime? Can a national rebellion led by outsiders ever succeed? The Communist ideology that fueled Che’s revolts may be on the wane, but the questions raised by his writing and fighting are as relevant as ever.
Rated R for some violence.

