Steven Soderbergh (2008)
Che is being released in cinemas as two separate films, this month and next, but the Richmond Filmhouse had a special showing of both parts of the magnum opus on New Year’s Day (the fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s coming to power in Cuba). A few people applauded at the end but they were surely acclaiming their own powers of endurance rather than what they’d seen on screen. As a feat of logistics, Che is impressive; as a piece of dramatic cinema, it’s unilluminating. The total running time of the two parts (of nearly equal length) is 252 minutes, during which we learn that Dr Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was passionately and courageously committed to his political cause, that he was a quietly charismatic leader who inspired great loyalty in his fellow revolutionaries, and that Che’s guerrilla campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia were gruelling, dangerous and protracted. And that’s about it. After introductory scenes when Che first meets Castro and the revolutionaries set out for Cuba from their base in Mexico, the first film intersperses a description of the progress of the revolutionary troops towards Havana with, in black-and-white, Che’s visit to New York in December 1964 – there’s a speech to the UN, an interview with a journalist, a reception at which he meets, among others, Eugene McCarthy. The second film begins with a speech by Castro in which he reads from a letter he’s received from Che, explaining the latter’s sudden disappearance. Che considers that he has done all he can for Cuba and must move on to bringing about Marxist revolution elsewhere in South America (he has told Castro at their first meeting in 1955 that he has his sights set on the whole continent). Castro announces that Che has not only resigned his post in the Cuban government (he was Minister for Industry) but also renounced his Cuban citizenship. We then see Che, in disguise, at the early stages of planning of a campaign to bring down the military dictatorship in Bolivia (there’s also a brief and touching scene of his home life with his wife and five children before he goes back into action). The rest of the second film consists of Che’s Bolivian campaign – mostly military action with a couple of brief sequences that illustrate the living conditions of Bolivian peasants. The campaign extended over nearly a year. Che was assassinated by Bolivian government forces in October 1967.
In other words, most of both films is devoted to scenes of warfare. As far as I can tell, these scenes are skilfully and credibly composed and executed (although the visual authority of the second film was rather spoiled at the Filmhouse by the characters’ heads often being cut off at the top of the frame). They fail, however, to make clear why Steven Soderbergh – who, according to IMDB, also did the cinematography, as ‘Peter Andrews’ – chose to make a dramatised biography out of the material. In an old-fashioned biopic/military epic, the hero’s team of soldiers would probably have been introduced and explained as characters before or at the time of their recruitment to the cause. Soderbergh appears to have wanted to avoid that kind of cliché; I can see (and respect) why he may have thought this was a subject that demanded a treatment which wasn’t merely character-based – why he felt that approach had been tried and had failed too often before in mainstream cinema dealing with political events. The problem is that he and his scenarists Peter Buchman and Benjamin A van der Veen haven’t found a satisfying alternative. Apart from Che, Castro and one or two others, the characters don’t emerge as individuals at all (and if the point is that the revolutionaries were prepared to sacrifice their individuality to the larger cause this is an ineffective way of making it). Particularly in the second film, Soderbergh often cuts to characters as if the audience has a sufficiently full understanding of them to mean that seeing their faces will be enough to orient us. At these moments, I kept thinking that I didn’t know who I was looking at (or, if I did, that I had no idea of the motivation or character behind the face I was seeing). I really only noticed the other characters if they were distinctive in a very obvious way – if they were female or black or a well-known actor (Matt Damon makes a very brief, one-scene appearance and Julia Ormond is the journalist interviewing Che in New York).
At the start of the first part, the screen shows a map of Cuba and Soderbergh indicates, one by one and quite slowly, the key locations on the map. The second part begins with a corresponding map of the continent, with each of its countries pointed out in geographical turn. This suggests a methodical, instructive approach which, in neither film, is followed through. It’s possible that Soderbergh shot so much film that he found himself having to elide a great deal; there are certainly instances where an explanation of events appears to have been lost as a result of cuts. In the second film, for example, we see Che in a bad way as a result of his chronic asthma; he refuses to let one of his men go back for his medicines; in the next scene, Che appears to have recovered. But, then, the whole structure of the film is based on a scenes-from-a-guerrilla-campaign approach rather than on a developing narrative. Soderbergh indicates with precision that we’ve moved from Day 1 to Day 67 to Day 145 to Day 283 etc of the campaign but I didn’t have much sense, until the closing stages anyway, of its progress, of whether the prospects for Che and his followers were getting better or worse or were unchanging. (In this respect, the film recalls Arnold Toynbee’s remark that some historians hold that history is one damned thing after another.) And, if he was forced to make extensive cuts, Soderbergh’s non-characterising approach may be less intentional than it might seem.
Benicio del Toro is a very fine actor and, because the film as a whole is so unsatisfying, his portrait of Che may be underrated (although he won the Best Actor prize at Cannes). He’s remarkably subtle in conveying Che’s authority; nothing seems false or actorish. He consistently suggests a complex (and obstinate) intelligence. Some of what he does is magical (for example, the expressiveness of his stillness – which conveys both resignation and intransigence – when he sits on the floor of his cell after his capture by Bolivian government soldiers). I think the script necessarily limits del Toro’s opportunities (I felt I learned more about Che Guevara as a person in The Motorcycle Diaries) – although some admirers of Soderbergh’s film and/or of its subject may welcome the fact that Che, through his opacity, fully retains his mystique. As Castro, Demián Bichir has a strong, vivid presence that convinces you of Castro’s force of personality and aptitude for the role of public face of the revolution, even if Che and others were more of the brains behind it. Catalina Sandina Moreno has a graceful nobility as Aleida, initially a comrade in arms and subsequently Che’s wife; she conveys almost wordlessly Aleida’s loving acceptance that her husband has a higher calling than family life. It’s hard to find fault with anyone else in the huge cast – except that they don’t register strongly. Ramon Fernandez, in the small part of Che’s bodyguard, made more impression on me than anyone, apart from the above three; we see him gobbling as much finger food as is possible while remaining in the background at the New York reception for Che and, in his next scene, showing the strength of his professional and personal loyalty to his boss. The first of these two sequences greatly strengthens the impact of the second: Soderbergh could have used more of this kind of incisive, expressive detail.
Because he’s such a powerfully human presence, Benicio del Toro ensures that we don’t often feel we’re watching a paragon but persuades us that we’re watching a hero. And Che isn’t politically complex: it seems to be taken as read that what its protagonist did was right. Given the social conditions of the people Che was attempting to liberate, it’s not difficult to accept that – but it’s still a large intellectual leap from saying that the revolutionaries did well to remove the Batista dictatorship to saying that the half century of the Castro regime in Cuba has been A Good Thing. The Filmhouse is giving out commemorative (celebratory) postcards to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that brought Castro to power. These are in the name of philosophyfootball.com (‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’) and offer contact details for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. It seems hard to believe that Steven Soderbergh (the maker of Ocean’s Eleven/Twelve/Thirteen) is much more of a Marxist than most of the clients of the Richmond Filmhouse but Che does have its hagiographic moments. (To say the least: when Che invites an affable Bolivian guard, who’s offered him a drag on his cigarette, to go the next step by untying him, the guard’s frightened refusal is presented almost like one of the betrayals of Christ by his disciples – and Che responds with a smile of infinite regret and understanding.) This simple-mindedness makes you feel it may be just as well that Che is low on dramatic and emotional momentum (even though Albert Iglesias’s supple score helps to reinforce what there is). The lack of momentum helps the film to avoid being politically controversial – even if its director meant it to be.
1 January 2009
