In November 1956 he left Mexico for Cuba in a leaky boat with 82 men, only 12 of whom would live to see victory. The sequence depicting this traversal toward the island and struggle that would define Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s destiny is stark, quiet, fleeting, yet, tellingly, it offers one of the film’s rare close-ups of its protagonist. It lingers in your mind long after you’ve watched Che in its entirety, not simply because this moment is returned to so eloquently in its coda, but because by the time you’ve made it through all this you can’t help but look back on it as one of those truly indelible turning points, punctured with immediacy, anticipation, history, ambiguity. It’s the threshold upon which one of the 20th century’s most controversial and ideologically complex lives begins to truly bloom.
I saw Che first over two nights during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, and a second time several months later over the course of one sitting with a lunch break between the two parts. These two parts were originally entitled The Argentine and Guerilla but have since been marketed by the rather less inspired Part One and Part Two. Part One will open in Edmonton first as a single feature, and there are perfectly good reasons for Edmontonians, or anyone for that matter, to see it separately with plenty of digestion time before the more daunting Part Two arrives in the coming weeks, even if the films possess a certain extra potency when viewing them in succession as a diptych, as two chronicles of armed uprisings, one successful and legendary, the other disastrous and sad. No matter how they’re packaged, I urge you to see them both in the theatre, without interruptions, to submit to this audacious beast of an epic. This decade-in-development labour of love from producer Laura Bickford, actor Benicio del Toro and director Steven Soderbergh is a most particular kind of masterwork, demanding special attention and, I believe, rewarding it in kind.
Part One is, by contrast at least, the more conventional biopic of the two, shifting mainly between two trajectories. One follows Guevara’s pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution from 1956-59, which closes on a perfect note—he’s just about to roll into Havana and heady glory but stops on the way to chew out some colleagues for appropriating a gorgeous convertible—that stops just shy of what a flabbier movie would consider the proper climax. The other is his visit to New York and the United Nations in 1964, when he was at his height of international celebrity and is interviewed by journalist Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) for ABC. “Maybe a little powder,” Guevara (Del Toro, so good with stillness that he can absorb a multitude of possible intentions at once) quietly suggests after initially declining any make-up for the cameras. It’s one of a number of moments of levity and conveys something of Guevara’s learned sense of showmanship, a striking counterpoint to the preceding years of spartan jungle existence, the strategizing, the combat, the asthma attacks, and the submission to the vision of Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir), already rehearsing his beard-stroking and cigar waving.
This is in part a movie about merely extraordinary men becoming global icons, told through the accumulation and refinement of facial hair and the symbolic value of battle fatigues. It isn’t, I think, a polemical movie in any clear-cut sense. Despite the propagandistic poster art, Soderbergh hasn’t calibrated Che to render Guevara a more humanized hero or, as is often the case with biopics, clumsily reduce his persona or accomplishments. Yet one of Che’s most distinguishing characteristics is surely the ways in which its mise en scène corroborates with Guevara’s ethos. For a film ostensibly about one man, the integrity of the collective is repeatedly emphasized, not only in the scenes of Guevara’s training, camaraderie, lecturing or disciplining of his comrades-in-arms—among whom Santiago Cabrera’s Camilo Cienfuegos really deserves to be singled out for his charismatic presence—but in Soderbergh’s camerawork, guerilla-like production model and the process-oriented narrative itself, which updates and renovates the dormant aesthetic of the docudrama. You could even say that Che is in a sense a dramatized instruction manual, perhaps the only war movie from which a layman can actually grasp a coherent sense of how an uprising is staged.
Of course to really see the extent to which Che commits to evoking the most grueling aspects of jungle warfare one needs to wait for Part Two, where Soderbergh’s commitment to this fusion of form and content becomes more singly focused and severe. But we’ll come back to that when Part Two receives its Edmonton release, which is hopefully very soon.
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