The Importance Of Being Ernesto

I don’t know if Che, Steven Soderbergh’s epic film about the life of the iconic guerrilla leader Ernesto Guevara, is as radical or revolutionary as its subject, but in terms of its visual and narrative style, it certainly represents a defiant departure from Hollywood biopic conventions.

For one thing, it’s been structured as two complementary films: Part One, subtitled The Argentine, deals mainly with the Cuban revolution and the eventual overthrow of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and opens in Edmonton this week. Part Two, a.k.a. Guerrilla, covers Guevara’s unsuccessful 1967 to foment a similar revolution in Bolivia, will open next week, and will be reviewed separately then.

More significant, though, is the sparseness of the film’s storytelling. It’s as though Soderbergh started out with a “normal” biopic screenplay, and then simply subtracted every bit of expository dialogue. Any speeches where Guevara reveals his fears, his hopes, his dreams? Gone. Any conversations that neatly and digestibly lay out the origins of the revolution or Castro’s overall strategy for defeating the Cuban army? Absent. Any snappy, colourful dialogue exchanges to help you easily label the large cast of supporting characters? Nowhere to be found. Incidents that a normal movie would linger on — Guevara breaking his arm, Guevara doling out harsh punishment to deserters and spies, even the rebels’ 1959 victory — are underplayed, as if they were no more important than anything else that happened during the campaign. Has there ever been a film about an underdog victory less exultant than Che?

It’s not surprising to learn that Terrence Malick was originally attached to direct this project; like Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Che is less interested in establishing plot points, glorifying Guevara, or condemning him than in immersing the viewer in an overall experience that’s larger than any single character — larger, even, than Guevara himself. Various supporting characters do emerge from the tapestry here and there, but it’s not like Soderbergh makes any special effort to draw your attention to them or identify them by name — you take notice of the pretty soldier, played by Maria Full of Grace’s Catalina Sandino Moreno, who fights alongside Guevara in the climactic Battle of Santa Clara, but Soderbergh doesn’t give any indication that this woman is Aleida March, who’d marry Guevara just six months later. True, Soderbergh does occasionally use exchanges from a 1964 interview Guevara gave to newswoman Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) as occasional voiceover narration — but unlike, say, Sean Penn’s boilerplate biopic narration in Milk, Guevara’s comments are much more slippery and in fact are frequently contradicted by the images accompanying them.

Soderbergh has said in interviews that Che is a film about “process,” which seems like a perplexing way to approach a subject as dynamic and controversial as Guevara. But it’s a tipoff that Che finds Soderbergh in one of his periodic formalist moods — like The Good German (shot in black and white on studio sets under studio lights using 1940s technology) or Bubble (shot on high-definition video with a non-professional cast), it’s one of those movies where he’s more interested in how to tell his story than in the story itself. In Che, he even avoids close-ups in order to emphasize the collective, democratic spirit of the Cuban revolution. I admire Soderbergh’s restraint and his refusal to commodify Guevara’s image, the way so many poster-makers and T-shirt manufacturers have been eager to do, but it doesn’t make this film easy to like.

That I’ve gotten this far into this review without even mentioning Benicio Del Toro’s performance as Guevara is itself an indication of how anti-dramatic Soderbergh’s approach to its subject really is — Del Toro appears in pretty much every scene, but he’s just one more element of an overall revolutionary process. It’s a performance that manages to seem modest even as he conveys Guevara’s incredible charisma. But I’m reluctant to say anything more definitive than that until seeing Che’s second half.