film, eyeballs, brain

I’m talking to you, Steven Soderbergh: you don’t know me, but it is my fervent hope that you continue making your big summer blockbusters like Ocean’s 25 and Ocean’s 26 and Erin Brockovich – hell, even make kid movies like Danny Boyle, or make more unnecessary remakes like Solaris, or make some movie with yappy little Pomeranians, or even a rom-com starring Jennifer Aniston – anything, really, just as long as you can finance your other projects like your insane-sounding 3-D musical with Catherine Zeta-Jones as Cleopatra and Hugh Jackman as Marc Antony and a score written by my beloved Guided by Voices (and ostensibly resurrected from the dead), or your hopefully NC-17 call-girl movie starring my beloved Sasha Grey (okay, I’m not that big a fan, but her skills are mighty impressive, plus she digs Godard and Merzbow), or, most important of all, your superb, epic movie Che.

Che is easily Soderbergh’s most ambitious film since 2000′s Traffic, and certainly eclipses that film’s artistic reach as well. Che is actually two films; not only are they based on different source materials, they’re also quite different in terms of narrative tone and filmic style. (The one-week “roadshow” presentation I saw the other night showed both films one after the other, with a fifteen-minute intermission in between. It doesn’t have credits, like Apocalypse Now; in lieu of credits, IFC Films distributed a handsome keepsake booklet, complete with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark.) Che is almost four-and-a-half hours long and I loved every riveting minute of it.

The first half is unashamed hero-worship. There’s nothing wrong with this, regardless of how members of the audience may regard Che Guevara — nothing wrong as Soderbergh seems to purposely set it up as an exploration of his celebrity. (And hey, I’m talking to you, Mick LaSalle, and your surprisingly partisan political reading of the film, along with 180-odd comments from people who clearly haven’t seen, or will not bother seeing, the movie.)

Soderbergh films the charismatic Che (played, in what may be his defining role, by an equally charismatic Benicio del Toro) in an almost beatific light. In the New York flash-forwards (filmed in grainy black-and-white), every bit of scraggly facial hair is seen in loving detail, the camera lingering sensuously on the curls of cigar smoke. One almost gets the feeling that Soderbergh perhaps deliberately chose to film “Che, the Legend” for Part One – the reason why he’s worn on T-shirts, as Oscar put it – in a manner similar to how Terrence Malick specifically explores the myth of Pocahontas in The New World. (Malick, incidentally, was the first director / scriptwriter attached to the Che project before he took off to make the latter film.)

Part One shifts between Che’s stirring, triumphant speech to the United Nations in 1964 and his merry band of soldiers making their way northwest towards Havana and Batista’s eventual overthrow in early 1957. Such intercutting isn’t just po-mo narrative juggling on Soderbergh’s part; it’s a canny method that illuminates how ideology and praxis were clearly intertwined for Che. The man, it should be clear, was far from being a saint, but he’s shown here constantly ministering to the poor and winning the support of the campesinos. He’s greeted like a rock star by flag-waving villagers after brief gunfights (if at all) with the local police. The film then ends with the so-called Battle of Santa Clara, where Che’s outnumbered guerrillas win a decisive urban battle, and it’s probably as close as Soderbergh has ever gotten to making a classical Western set piece (it even includes derailing a train).

But like Gus Van Sant’s Milk, Che isn’t exactly about the titular character Che. Despite his commanding presence, Che himself remains something of an emotional cipher in the movie, playing second fiddle to Castro in the service of the Revolution. (I’m guessing we get more insight into his character in Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, which I have not yet seen.) Except for the New York scenes, there are hardly any close-ups; del Toro almost always appears as part of an ensemble in medium-range shots. But it doesn’t change the fact that his thoughts are front and center: throughout the first half of the movie, Che’s words – excerpted from an interview with television reporter Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) – are uttered as voiceovers, like pearls of wisdom from a spiritual guru.

It is the second half, which chronicles Che’s ill-fated attempt to export the Revolution to Bolivia, that is perhaps most interesting of all. It’s almost an entirely different film, for starters. The narrative development turns more parsimonious, with the diary-like sequences becoming more rigorous in form as Che’s guerrilla campaign plunges into chaos: a title noting the number of days Che and his followers are in Bolivia (“Day 261″ superimposed over a shot of the soldiers walking in the dry Bolivian forest, then a skirmish, or, more likely, a scene showing the guerrillas desperate for food or some semblance of victory. The sequence ends, and another random day begins.

This is in contrast to the passage of time in Part One: despite the intercutting, it’s still structured very much like a conventional war movie. Che’s guerrillas would vanish easily into the verdant Cuban landscape in Part One; in Part Two there’s a palpable edginess to their scenes in the more barren hills, the camera peering suspiciously at the soldiers behind twigs and rocks as if to suggest that these interloping Cuban extranjeros didn’t belong there. Repeatedly (and I don’t think this happens in the first half), we see the guerrillas from the vantage point of CIA-trained Bolivian soldiers, their rifles pointed at Che’s men – a complete turnabout from the way the Cuban military either laid down their arms or joined his ranks.

Part Two is unadorned, with no flashbacks or flash-forwards or voiceovers, and barely a soundtrack to tell you what to feel (I’m talking to you, Danny Elfman, and your irritating soundtrack for Milk). Most crucially, it functions almost as a mirror image of the first, the antithesis of the events in Part One: the once-cheering peasants (in Cuba), so crucial to the success of guerrilla warfare, are now betraying him (in Bolivia). In Cuba, Che himself broadcast his speeches on pirate radio; in Bolivia, their only link to the world outside of the forest is through the government-controlled station (if they can get a signal at all), announcing the death of miners or their own comrades in arms. Che himself is now a beaten-down and grizzled soldier, wheezing pathetically from asthma, his earlier charisma only a memory.

It is almost as if Soderbergh, through his cinematic experiment, is deliberately undercutting the fervor of the first half, or showing the viewer the tedious and frightening labor necessary to effect change. In Part Two, the Grand Narrative of the Revolution had petered out, leaving only the dry husk of daily and dangerous routine behind.

No, Che will, alas, never make $100 million, but the idea of a third movie about Che in Prague, writing about his failed mission in the Congo, sounds fantastic. I’ll be at the ticket line.

[See also Barb's take on the film.]

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