Che: The Heeb Review
by Jed Oelbaum
Ernesto Guevara, doctor, Jedi freedom fighter, popular T-shirt design and the subject of Steven Soderbergh’s fawning four and a half hour Che, was executed in Bolivia, already beaten down by the rigors of his failed insurgency, still high off the fumes of Cuba’s revolutionary success. The Bolivian campaign, which makes up the second half of this biopic, famously crashed and burned, failing to energize or recruit common Bolivians, flaming out in an ever increasing quantity of death, desperation and facial hair. It’s indicative of Soderbergh’s focus, and the nature of folk heroism perhaps, that the story deem insignificant any other character besides Che—at best, the cast of characters who surround him are but fodder for the legend. The film’s starter story does a better job in its depiction of Cuba’s fantastic, totally radical, trying, but mostly fun revolution, in which a bossy young lawyer named Fidel Castro helps Che cut his gums on guerilla action, and learn valuable lessons in leadership, struggle, and the true meaning of Christmas communism.
It’s hard to imagine what the two parts of the film, written as separate entities (“The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”), would be like to watch individually; the first feeling kinda incomplete in scope, a series of victories that left Guevara teetering on the edge of his failures, both as an apparatchik for the new Cuban government and in his future military campaigns. The second, I imagine, would be completely indecipherable, a series of lush jungle shots, whizzing bullets, and indistinguishable beardos, leaning completely on Benicio del Toro’s excellent performance, and falling from it’s first moments towards the anticlimax of his notoriously shitty death, a heady, straight-up two hours of bummer.
The first half of the film, in Spanish subtitles, cuts between overdubs representing interviews with the foreign press, grainy black-and-white renditions of Guevara’s time in New York City, and the greens, browns, and chalky stone of Cuba’s outlying regions. To be sure, the movie is nicely shot, and succeeds in maintaining its illusion throughout; the martial procession through the endless foliage, the fraternity and violence of guerilla warfare, and the whirling, bloody jubilance of a people’s victory all come together to paint the popular version of Guevara’s legend.
Glaringly omitted were the events at La Cabana, a converted prison where without trial or defense, hundreds of “anti-revolutionaries” were executed under Che’s command. In an interview with The Guardian, Soderbergh says of the episode:
“As for La Cabana, that wasn’t a period I was interested in portraying because I was making a diptych about two military campaigns…La Cabana was really turned into a Roman circus, where I think even the people in power look back on that as excessive. However, every regime, in order to retain power when it feels threatened, acts excessively.”
Moral relativism aside, the lionization of Guevara extends through both halves, with del Toro’s noble, wheezing poet/warrior making for an effective, if distant hero; galvanizing the people, fighting the fight and eventually laying it down for what he believed in.
Understanding Che is to understand two films, shot in different locations, on different types of film, and aside from del Toro, an almost entirely different cast. “The Argentine,” despite its uneven placement in Guevara’s life and times, is a pretty solid piece of storytelling, with a couple of larger-than-life characters, relevant context (the New York stuff, etc.) and some exciting battle scenes. “Guerrilla” builds its tensions on warfare alone, the duck and cover, the ambush, the exchange of fire through the trees; a violent dirge for a doomed martyr. It fades into what feels like three scenes: training, shooting and dying. Together, the two parts make for an imbalanced experience, captivating at times, well-performed and ultimately, just too goddamn long.
comments
submit a comment01.03.09 at 9:01 pm
Good review. I find Che’s life fascinating, and think both his good and bad sides need to be explored. He had his brutal moments. La Cabana is one of the most important chapters in his life, and cannot be dismissed, as it certainly laid a foundation to everything he did afterward, the views he held, and his acceptance of violence as a means for revolution. I lived in South America for two years, including four months in Argentina. Che is still a controversial figure (although the Argentine obsession with ‘the Falklands/las malvinas’ and Diego Maradona take precedence).
Caleb
http://calebpowell.wordpress.com
01.13.09 at 8:01 pm
Your reviewer seems to take enjoyment in Guevara ‘crashing and burning’ and failing to take his message to ordinary Bolivians.The message, as Soderbergh has him tell his guard right at the end of the second film that the Bolivians didn’t understand they were being manipulated by foreign interests, before, in a deliberate attempt to appear prophetic,referencing recent events in Bolivia.The Vallegrandinos (the body was laid out in Vallegrande before being spirited away) turned their backs on him, believing him to be a devil.
My wife, who is Vallegrandino, has occasionally expressed shame that her community were too ignorant to understand Guevara wanted just to help them.She said people ran away when he tried to speak to them.Her parents were there as young adults (her gleefully rightwing uncle saw the body laid out) and although she wasn’t even born, she still feels shame.
25 years later, Vallegrande is one of the lowland strongholds of Evo Morales socialist MAS party.Morales has, since being elected, been the recipient of several assassination attempts and even attempts to initiate a civil war in Bolivia to ‘liberate’ the eastern gas fields from central government control, aided and abetted by the very same CIA freedom fighters who gave the instruction to ‘dí buen dia a papá, ie pull the trigger on Guevara.So far they are failing in their democratic objectives.It looks like the Bolivians did listen.
As for the dynamic of the film, there’s no way round it: he messed up and snuffed it.The story could have been told as if it was a secular version of the passion, as the standard version of the myth has it, but Soderbergh gives us something more redolent of Richard Holmes’ classic biography of Coleridge – part 1, stellar achievements of youth and perpetual promise, part 2 – worldly realities and abject failure.
Like Holmes’ books, the films stake their claim for greatness by their refusal to run scared of this essential truth.
01.13.09 at 8:01 pm
Your reviewer seems to take enjoyment in Guevara ‘crashing and burning’ and failing to take his message to ordinary Bolivians.The message, as Soderbergh has him tell his guard right at the end of the second film that the Bolivians didn’t understand they were being manipulated by foreign interests, before, in a deliberate attempt to appear prophetic,referencing recent events in Bolivia.The Vallegrandinos (the body was laid out in Vallegrande before being spirited away) turned their backs on him, believing him to be a devil.
My wife, who is Vallegrandino, has occasionally expressed shame that her community were too ignorant to understand Guevara wanted just to help them.She said people ran away when he tried to speak to them.Her parents were there as young adults (her gleefully rightwing uncle saw the body laid out) and although she wasn’t even born, she still feels shame.
25 years later, Vallegrande is one of the lowland strongholds of Evo Morales socialist MAS party.Morales has, since being elected, been the recipient of several assassination attempts and even attempts to initiate a civil war in Bolivia to ‘liberate’ the eastern gas fields from central government control, aided and abetted by the very same CIA freedom fighters who gave the instruction to ‘dí buen dia a papá, ie pull the trigger on Guevara.So far they are failing in their democratic objectives.It looks like the Bolivians did listen.
As for the dynamic of the film, there’s no way round it: he messed up and snuffed it.The story could have been told as if it was a secular version of the passion, as the standard version of the myth has it, but Soderbergh gives us something more redolent of Richard Holmes’ classic biography of Coleridge – part 1, stellar achievements of youth and perpetual promise, part 2 – worldly realities and abject failure.
Like Holmes’ books, the films stake their claim for greatness by their refusal to run scared of this essential truth.