CHE (NOT RATED)  ***1/2

 

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. 257 minutes.

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Demian Bichir, Vladimir Cruz, Franka Potente, Lou Diamond Phillips, Julia Ormond, Victor Rasuk and Joaquim De Almeida. Released by IFC Films.

 

For sheer chutzpah alone, Steven Soderbergh’s four hour and eighteen minute Che deserves some kind of award. The film, split into two movies that are currently running as one large road show for one week in New York, is part triptych, part docudrama ala Peter Watkins, part Lawrence of Arabia as a handheld indie art picture and nearly always fascinating. The film jumps from here to there with little explanation, but surprisingly works for most of its lengthy duration. And, in 95 percent of the scenes, there is Benicio Del Toro channeling the legendary freedom fighter without ever letting us into the communist revolutionary’s mind or soul. But that’s not exactly the point here.

 

In fact, Soderbergh’s ambitious film is much more in line with Paul Greengrass’ films, namely Bloody Sunday and United 93 and not the Bourne films, than 1969’s Che or The Motorcycle Diaries, which, for my money, is slightly underrated. Soderbergh’s Che is more like a documented fact, though A.O. Scott refers to the film – respectfully, mind you - as a “fairy tale” in his review of the film. And that’s not far from the truth. Del Toro’s cinematic Ernesto “Che” Guevara is just as elusive and enigmatic as the real Che, but that’s not to say that he’s not putting in the work. In fact, the actor is, in nearly every scene, running about, raising his voice, speechmaking or just laying back and, for the most part, physically exerting himself one way or the other. Just because we don’t know Guevara here doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge his presence. The film is populated by recognizable actors playing bit parts but, other than Del Toro, the only other real character is the army with which he surrounds himself. The mass of men and women, dressed in similar garb, pushing through the jungle or firing at rooftops of buildings in Cuban squares are merely one figure, rather than a collection of personalities. Oh yeah, and there’s also Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir).

 

The first film – The Argentine -  does not necessarily run in a linear mode, jumping all around the late 1950s and early 1960s as Guevara joins the Cuban Revolution, helps overthrow Batista’s government, speaks before the United Nations and attends a New York party, gathers young Cubans for the fight and takes it to the streets. Frankly, I thought The Argentine is the better of Soderbergh’s two Che films. The film keeps you on edge for most of its duration. The cinematography is broken up between a gritty, handheld style and Cinemascope-style sweeping landscapes, most of the time punctuated by random outbursts of gunfire and punctured bodies.

 

While still strong and with a solid finish, the second film – Guerilla – is not quite as focused as The Argentine. Then again, it’s not meant to be. The second part of Che plays out like some sort of military revolution fever dream  - Revolution No. 9 cinematically realized, perhaps. Nearly all of the picture is set within the jungles of Bolivia, where Guevara led an unsuccessful campaign with a rag tag group of youths and pseudo revolutionaries in an attempt to create the Cuban Revolution in the other Latin American country. Che, posing as a man named Ramon, shows his recruits how to fire a weapon and forces most of them to live off next to nothing. A group of men are reprimanded when they are caught drinking from a can of some sort of soup. “One can will feed six men for breakfast,” they are told by their superior.

 

The film’s second half is an unruly mixture of a Che movie mixed with a Terrence Malick picture, Apocalypse Now, a documentary and Peter Watkins’ Paris Commune 1871. Soderbergh’s camera spends about an hour, if not more, merely tracking Guevara and his foot soldiers through the Bolivian jungles as they make war with Bolivian soldiers during the final reels of Guerilla. The combination of Soderbergh’s more straightforward, yet also elliptical, first act and his less structured, nightmarishly dreamy second act add up to less of a portrait of the titular character than an exercise, albeit a fascinating one, in mythmaking. The film, despite several rough patches that slow down the picture during the second part, mostly moves forward in a strange sort of rhythm. It’s an experience, for sure, and one of the more daring American films of recent. Even if the film is not quite the quintessential 2008 film, Soderbergh directs as if it were. You have to admire any quest this mad or a film this long and wide reaching that is, at the same time, so uncommercial. Soderbergh is an experimental filmmaker at heart – despite his Ocean’s 11 distractions – and Che is nothing if not an experiment. A mostly successful one at that.