'Che': Cuba Libre? By Kurt Loder
Steven Soderbergh attempts to fill out the world's most famous T-shirt.
A four-and-a-half-hour movie in subtitled Spanish, you say? About a
dubious and long-dead '60s revolutionary? I have to admit that such a
picture might normally not vault to the top of my must-see list. But
"Che" is a Steven Soderbergh film — two films, actually — so it's not
entirely what you might expect. For one thing, Che Guevara, the man who
helped Fidel Castro impose a 50-year-long (and counting) dictatorship on
Cuba, is played by Benicio Del Toro — an actor who can say more with his
dark brood than many actors can with a mouthful of dialogue. And as
usual, Soderbergh not only directed the picture, but shot it, too (under
his usual pseudonym), so there's very little sag and drift, and it looks
great. I saw both films when they were screened together last month
(separated by a half-hour intermission), and I was not bored.
Part One of "Che" shows us the Argentinian adventurer meeting Castro
(played with a marvelous darting lightness by Mexican actor Demián
Bichir) in Mexico City in 1955, and sailing to Cuba with him and a small
group of fellow revolutionaries intent on toppling the corrupt and
brutal (and U.S.-backed) Batista dictatorship. It also follows Guevara
on some of his post-revolution foreign travels, when he was a sort of
Marxist rockstar on the international world-leader/cocktail-party
circuit. And we see him in New York delivering a fiery address at the
United Nations, condemning a long series of American interventions in
Latin America. (That's Del Toro up at the podium, but the footage is
black-and-white, and it looks totally newsreel.)
Laying all of this out chronologically would have allowed for plenty of
sag and drift, so Soderbergh hops back and forth through the years, and
he keeps us hopping with him, with little complaint. There are some
wonderful small moments. Just before a TV appearance, for example, Che
is offered makeup for the cameras; he rejects this notion, but then, on
his way to the door, turns and says, "Maybe a little powder."
Considering the length of this bipartite movie, a surprising amount of
relevant information has been left out. Che's hatred of capitalism
(ironic in a man who favored Rolex watches) and individualism generally
pretty much guaranteed the messes he created in overseeing agrarian
reform and the National Bank of Cuba. And there's only the most oblique
reference to his tenure as commander of the notorious La Cabaña prison,
where he presided over the "revolutionary justice" executions of
hundreds, some have said thousands, of people — CIA stooges and
traitors, in his view; children as young as 14, in the testimony of
others. Also elided from the film is his failure to export Cuban-style
insurrection to such other countries as the Congo, from which he
departed in defeat with his beret between his legs.
Guevara's final failure — the subject of Part Two of "Che" — was his
attempt to foment a communist revolution in Bolivia, where actual
Bolivians looked upon him as a dodgy foreigner, and ultimately betrayed
him to government troops and their CIA trainers. He was executed by
Bolivian soldiers in October of 1967. He lives on, of course, as a
T-shirt — the crowning capitalist irony — and as a symbol of romantic
rebellion to many, many people, including all manner of wealthy
musicians and actors: exactly the sort of capitalist lackeys who would
find themselves either imprisoned or facing a firing squad under their
hero's system of summary justice (along with many otherwise-blameless
homosexuals of their acquaintance).
The most interesting thing about these two extraordinary films is how
glancingly they deal with the troublesome (and now outmoded) political
ideals of this supremely political man. The director has approached his
subject as the complicated human being he was in life, not the overblown
symbol he has become since his death. Del Toro plays him this way, too —
we hear as much as we should about the odiousness of the Batista regime
(although not of the Castro regime that followed it), and the low estate
of the average Cuban under a military dictator who sucked up millions
from American business interests and openly did deals with mainland
Mafia kingpins. But what we take away from both pictures is the
exhausting grind of the revolutionary life, and the restless disillusion
that can settle in after the wars of liberation have been won. The
movies don't begin to tell the whole story of Che Guevara — that's what
books are for; but they do suggest substantial human truths about
idealism, betrayal and despair. And that's not bad.
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