You can’t say that Steven Soderbergh’s Che isn’t beautifully shot and scored. You can’t say that Benicio Del Toro doesn’t give himself completely to the title role. You can’t say that it’s not an extremely daring piece of cinema –– in fact, it takes incredible balls to make a film this long, this wonky, while giving the audience this little to actually care about. In four-plus hours, across which Del Toro transforms from mild-mannered 20-something physician to dutiful soldier to full-on disciplinarian bad ass, then pops up in Bolivia after Intermission as a crazed, wheezing optimist who leads a doomed mission fueled purely by his unshakable faith that past glories are repeatable, Soderbergh manages to show an almost complete lack of concern for the inner life of his protagonist. If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents, Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che’s public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the directior hasn’t brought out of the material.
Soderbergh, who showed up to today’s post-NYFF screening press conference wearing a scruffy Che-reminiscent beard, admitted that he began working on the film (he and Del Toro started discussing the project in 200) long before he managed to define his attraction to his subject. “Sometime you say yes, and you’re not sure why you said yes,” the director said. “I went in with ore of an idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do.”
“It wasn’t until the films were finished, right around Cannes, that I realized…it was about engagement versus disengagement. Every day in our lives, we’re making decisons. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realised that what was compelling to me about Che was that when he decided to engage, he engaged fully.”
If only the same could be said of the filmmaker.
As an auteur, Soderbergh’s main strength, at least from Out of Sight on, has been his ability to use style to pump up substance, usually in order to give the illusion that he’s paying more attention to subtext than I suspect he actually is. One would think the life story of Che Guevara would have more inherently going on under the surface than, say, a Rat Pack remake, but if so it’s not the target of Soderbergh’s concern. The first half of Che cross-cuts between Guevara in the 50s––traveling with Fidel Castro from Mexico to Cuba on a leaky boat which served as a grave for 70 of 82 men; forming an army and inculcating the troops with the basics of his brand of Communism; and finally taking over Cuba’s cities, overthrowing Batista and marching into Havana––and his visit to New York in 1964, where he represented Cuba at the United Nations and was interviewed on Face the Nation. Up until the last series of battles for Cuba, Soderbergh mainly relies on the interview device to allow Guevara, through an English translator, to narrate his own rise to war hero and international celebrity. Though Soderbergh drops this device in the film’s second half (which details the last year of Che’s life, spent trying to mount a revolution in Bolivia), between scenes of Guevara counseling his troops and peeks into René Barrientos strategy meetings with CIA operatives, on the whole Che is probably 75 percent spoken exposition. Unless someone is shooting or getting shot at, they’re probably making an explanatory speech about their political beliefs and/or military strategy.
In short, there’s very little human drama in this movie, and if that wasn’t problematic enough for Che as a biopic, it’s anathema for Che as a movie about war. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what attracted Soderbergh to the material if he hadn’t made that comment about “engagement versus disengagement”; from watching his film, I have no idea why Che felt that he must engage, and I could only assume that Soderbergh cared about that “engagement” because of an affinity for Guevara’s politics. But at the press conference, he resisted suggestions that he made Che to celebrate the ideology it dramatizes. “I guess I believe that any movie that accurately depicts anyone’s life, any movie that’s not a fantasy, that attempts to look at things in a sort of straightforward fashion, not polished-up, is a politcal film,” he said. “There is an ideology that’s being acted upon [in the film], and that’s political. But that wasn’t what drew me to the story. I’m obviously not a Communist.”
I’m rarely one to suggest that filmmakers should be more eager to use their work as a vehicle for their political bias, but in this case, Soderbergh’s unwillingness to make a statement may be a major part of the problem: the embodiment of “cool” media, Che is a film that bears no perceptible trace of its maker’s point of view. It’s greatest triumph is its complete and total dryness. Che may be an extremely accurate portrait of these two periods in Guevara’s life (although how accurate a portrait it can really offer without sketching in the years between the triumph in Cuba and the fatal folly in Bolivia is up for debate), but truly epic works of cinema have more on the agenda than the literal translation of life. Can this be said of Che? Not that I can tell, but I’m eager for its fans to tell me what I’m missing.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth