Guerrilla in the Mist: Soderbergh’s Che

There could hardly have been a stronger reaction at two early screenings of Che last week if Ernesto Guevara himself had shown up. (The old soldier would be 80, if he hadn’t been killed in Bolivia in 1967.) In Miami Beach, a few dozen protesters, mostly pensioners who had fled Cuba after the Castro takeover on New Year’s Day, 1959, protested the showing of Steven Soderbergh’s bio-epic. “The Jewish community would never allow any kind of film about Hitler like this to play here,” Abilio Leon, 65, told the Miami New Times. “It’s the same for us.” A younger man walked past the theater wearing a Che t-shirt — the iconic branding and ironic co-opting of a militant leader by the media-textile complex — but with Guevara’s image crossed out and marked with the words: “Cold Blooded Killer.”

A few days later, Soderbergh and his star, Benicio Del Toro, presented Che at the Havana Film Festival. The authorities had warned they would not allow the picture to be shown if it was critical of Fidel Castro, and they found nothing objectionable. (One scene included in the original Cannes Film Festival version of Che, showing Castro the commandante in an ambiguous light, was apparently cut.) “The Cuban public gave its endorsement with a strong ovation,” reported Granma, the island’s official Communist Party newspaper, which hedged its bets by observing that the Castro character (played by Demian Bichir) lacked “charisma and depth.” (Behind the Scenes on the set of Che)

There could be two, three, many opinions and interpretations of this strange and daunting experiment, in part because of its length: 4-1/2hrs., quite possibly the longest movie in the history of U.S. commercial films. (Che opens today in New York City as a single film in two parts and an intermission; it will play as separate films when it gets a wider release in Jan.)

Some people will question screenwriter Peter Buchman’s narrow focus on two military campaigns — the successful rebellion that led to the taking of Havana, Guevara’s disastrous operation in Bolivia nine years later — while ignoring Che’s role in mass executions in Cuba after the revolution and his ill-advised adventures in West Africa (where Egypt’s Nasser correctly predicted Guevara would be coming in as Tarzan among the natives). Others will wonder at the odd lack of dramatic incident among all the warfare. But you really can’t argue with Buchman and Soderbergh about the movie they didn’t make; a viewer must accept that they meant these to be bold strategies, and judge what’s on the screen.

Our judgment is that the two-part Che is a halfway movie: too expensive (reportedly $61 million) to be relegated to art houses, too stiff and forbidding to appeal to any part of a mass audience.

Say this for Soderbergh: among all contemporary American directors, he has the most restless ambitions. Since his debut film, the indie romantic comedy sex, lies, and videotape in 1989, he has won an Oscar (for directing Traffic), guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (the Ocean’s films). More important, he’s let his interests range far and wide, across different genres and different kinds of movies: intellectual science fiction (Solaris), quirky ensemble comedy (Full Frontal) and defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience’s prejudices (Erin Brockovich) or virtually say, “Don’t watch me” (Bubble, which, to be fair, was very worth watching).

He has the clout to get his projects off the ground and the work ethic to make them quickly: Che is his ninth feature this decade — ninth and tenth, if you count this double feature as two films — not including shorter films and the TV series K Street. And he doesn’t just direct his own films, he photographs them (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). Yet Soderbergh seems defined more by these giant, wayward ambitions than by a discernible authorial personality. If his name were taken off his films, sophisticated viewers would be hard pressed to locate a visual or thematic through-line.

Che Pasa?

Laura Bickford, who produced Che with Del Toro, says that the first part (shot in the 2.35:1 scope ratio) is “more of an action film with big battle scenes,” and the second part (shot in standard 1.85:1 wide-screen) is “more of a thriller.” Actually, neither tag truly applies. Though Part 1 begins by hopscotching from 1955, when Castro and Guevara meet, to later scenes in Havana and New York, the film is far less interested in explaining Guevara’s political importance than in showing how he operated in the two big campaigns; its mantra is process, not context.

(See TIME’s top 10 movies of 2008)

Like Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, this is a war movie that spends virtually all its time at war, showing how soldiers fight and die. Che’s depiction of guerrilla war tactics is so minutely detailed, it could provide an illuminating education to West Point cadets, or Taliban recruits. With about 80% of the two-part picture taking place in the Cuban or Bolivian jungle, it’s the woodsiest war movie ever, and not so much a long march as the daily log of a sylvan slog.

The first half of Che unreels as inspirational history, the second half unravels as tragedy. Part 2 is essentially a remake of Part 1, with many scenes repeated. Guevara has to instill military discipline in his ragtag rebels in Cuba, then in Bolivia. In both places he has to decide whether to accept underage volunteers. In both, he gives his men a chance to quit before the decisive battles, where they are fired on by unseen regular soldiers and suffer the deaths of friends who’ve made their big speech or sentimental impression moments before. The film suggests that any war is hell — the same kind of hell — and that a war movie should be like a real tour of duty: uncomfortable, monotonous (except when interrupted by combat) and way too long, with the draftees aching to achieve their goal or go home.

All this is an earnest of Soderbergh’s doggedly naturalistic, antidramatic approach here, which is admirable but enervating. The conflicts are almost entirely between Che and his men, between the platoon and their forest environment. Spending up to a year in the jungles of either Cuba or Bolivia, the soldiers seem trapped in some tropical Blair Witch Project, stripped of the scary bits. And forgive me for asking, but with all these young men separated from their girlfriends for such a long time, why (with one rapacious exception) do they never express any interest in women? The movie lets you infer that they’re bearded Boy Scouts, or celibate monks with guns.

Occasionally, the film is enlivened by the guest appearances of familiar actors, sometimes cast appropriately (Lou Diamond Phillips as Mario Monje, Catalina Sandina Moreno as Che’s second wife), sometimes not (Matt Damon as a priest-negotiator in Bolivia!?). But the major burden falls on its star, who nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro — whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof, thinking there’s nowhere to go but up — is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one pungent confrontation at the UN between Guevara and ambassadors from other Latin American countries, Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma.

The dyspepsia of Del Toro’s performance is partly due to the bromides he has to enunciate — that the most important quality of a revolutionary is “love,” and that he’s not a Catholic but “I believe in mankind” — and partly because so little information is vouchsafed about his non-jungle career or his private life. (You’re about 100 mins. into Part 1 before Che mentions in passing that he has a wife and child back home.) Halfway through the film he has lost much of the majesty and poignance you might expect of such a character, and by the end he’s relinquished his grasp on the moviegoer’s interest. After all that time spent with the revolutionary leader, viewers still may ask, “So, who is this guy?”

As Roger Ebert put it: “No attempt is made to get inside the mind of this complex man, Guevara. We are told he was a medical student, suffered from asthma, was more ruthless than Castro, was the real brain behind the operation. Big deal. … When we aren’t getting newsreels, we’re getting routine footage of guerrilla clashes in the jungle. … All this movie inspires toward the Cuban Revolution is excruciating boredom…”

Ebert wrote this in 1969, in a review of the flop Hollywood bio-pic Che!, with the not-very-Latin Omar Sharif as Guevara. Yet most of Ebert’s denunciations apply to Soderbergh’s movie, which dispenses with the exclamation point — and with almost all of the compelling, sometimes contradictory drama in Che Guevara’s life.

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it’s not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks “charisma and depth.”

(See TIME’s top 10 movies of 2008)