[FILM]

Cherisma

CHE, IFC Films

Review by David Sterritt

Che comes from the cameras of Steven Soderbergh, who's a hard filmmaker to pin down. He's best known for romantic comedies like Out of Sight and Sex, Lies, and Videotape and for caper pictures like Ocean's Eleven and its offspring. But in less commercial projects like Kafka and Schizopolis, he gives a semi-mystical spin to offbeat material, and in topical movies like Traffic and Erin Brockovich he takes on moral issues. Even a misfire like The Good German looks at an unsettling subject (American ties to Nazi war criminals) and his remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary novel, investigates the impotence of science when confronted with the transcendent.

Given the split in Soderbergh's artistic personality between moral seriousness and razzle-dazzle fun, I wasn't sure what to expect from Che, a four-hour-plus biopic about Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentina-born radical who became a physician as a young man, then spearheaded the Cuban revolution, served at the top of Fidel Castro's government, and ultimately lost his life in a failed crusade to spark Marxist rebellion across Latin America with a handful of guerillas in the Bolivian wild. On one hand, the obvious big-screen possibilities of jungle combat suggested that Soderbergh would go for gut-punching entertainment; on the other hand, pictures like The Thin Red Line and Clint Eastwood's recent World War II films remind us that thoughtful directors can explore warfare without exploiting it.

It turns out that Che is something I didn't anticipate-an intimate epic, claustrophobic in style and so obsessively fixated on Guevara's sheer physical presence that moral conundrums barely have room to poke their heads above the foliage, much less be examined and addressed. The first part, subtitled The Argentine, leapfrogs among various events in the Cuban revolution, from Guevara's first meeting with Castro to his United Nations speech in 1964; the second part, called Guerrilla, is a linear account of the Bolivian campaign. Cinematically, the picture is an experimental marathon that probably won't draw large audiences. Historically and ethically, it's impartial to a fault.

After seeing the film, I talked with Soderbergh and asked why he chose such an ideologically neutral approach. He told me he wanted to steer clear of Hollywood psychologizing: he didn't want a cooked-up scene of some momentous incident that turns idealistic Che into a ferocious warrior and he tried not to sensationalize the atrocious socioeconomic conditions that turned countless campesinos into natural revolutionaries. I respect that reasoning, and I respect the movie for its singleness of purpose and low-key creativity.

But people, we're talking about Che Guevara here! Scourge of capitalist oppressors! Or bloodthirsty jungle killer! Or both, or neither! Call him what you will, anybody within thinking distance of him has to take some kind of stand.

Since the movie is based on Guevara's own writings, Soderbergh could have portrayed the poverty and misery of pre-communist Cuba through revolutionary eyes, arguing that violent rebellion was the only plausible cure for such radical injustices. Or he could have taken an anti-Che position, detailing (for instance) Guevara's leading role in the tribunals and executions at Havana's infamous La Cabaña fortress after Castro assumed power. Guevara's idealism and ruthlessness are both acknowledged in the film, but neither is psychologically or sociologically fleshed out, leaving a void at the center of the story.

My own take is that, to start with the most obvious point, the last century's Latin American uprisings sprang far more from the unconscionable actions of imperial, oligarchic, and plutocratic powers (very much including U.S. agents and their wholly owned puppets) than from anything Guevara and company could have stirred up by themselves. Soderbergh knows that "every country in the Caribbean and Latin America was run by a leader in the pocket of the United States," as he put it to me. But he doesn't take the indispensable next step of measuring the revolution's ends and means against that outrageous reality and its appalling implications. Nor does he convey the theoretical dimensions of Guevara's work-his ideas about economic planning, the task of balancing economic growth with democratic rights, and the development of a socialist "new man and woman" with a new kind of humanitarian and communitarian spirit.

Any account of Guevara's life has to give these dimensions their due. Yet for all the time it hunkers down with him in the jungle, the movie gives little sense of why he's there or what the payoffs were later on: the massive campaign against illiteracy; the moves against racial (although not sexual) bigotry; the advances in health, education, and welfare that soared past those of other developing nations, convincing young idealists around the world that revolution, carried out when conditions are right, can produce lasting improvements in the everyday lives of ordinary people.

It's also undeniable that Castro and Guevara fomented abuses and excesses, and these should be in the mix as well, along with the large historical questions surrounding Guevara's legacy as a whole. Weighed against post-revolution declines in poverty, disease, dysfunction, and death, does the Cuban revolution qualify as a just war? How extensive were executions and torture as the Castro regime consolidated its power? How many of the victims were wrongly persecuted innocents and how many were reactionary foes of any mechanism for elevating the fortunes of rural and urban workers? For those who condemn Marxist revolution in any form, why has it been such an effective stage in the socioconomic growth of so many poor and exploited countries?

And let's think about today. How does the degree of Cuban revolutionary violence compare with the killing and maiming of nonaligned civilians in, say, the American invasions of Iraq in 2003 and Panama in 1989? How did Castro's prisons stack up against Guantánamo? Abu Ghraib? Bagram? How many suicides took place in them? And if the broad outlines of Guevara's legacy are as superseded and insupportable as detractors claim, what are the naysayers' suggestions for correcting, here and now, a global-capitalist order that sacrifices tens of thousands of children's lives every day to malnutrition, bad sanitation, preventable disease, and substandard medical care? Perhaps more violent interventions in oil-rich territories are in order?

I'm a film critic, and it's not my business to have ready answers for all these questions, although my opinions should be clear from the questions I've just listed. It is my business to put Soderbergh's movie under the microscope, and to lament the opportunity he's missed for coming up with his own responses for discussion and debate. To be fair, many scenes in the movie give substantial food for thought, especially when they touch on the enduring mystery of what drives a Che Guevara to put comfort, well-being, and life itself on the line in service to downtrodden strangers. My qualms about Soderbergh's political agnosticism didn't become particularly strong until I'd mulled it over for a few days, and even now the picture has me thinking. It benefits from some very interesting choices on Soderbergh's part, such as having the title role played by Benicio Del Toro, one of the most charismatic actors in the history of the cosmos, and then constantly photographing him in groups of people at a distance from the camera, countering the star's individualistic allure with the character's lifelong investment in collective action and communal values. This is solid, imaginative filmmaking.

All of which explains why my personal jury is still out. Che is often chilly and perplexing, yet it contains elements that are original, provocative, and relevant today, when U.S. power again faces insurgents spawned by its own belligerence and paranoia. The film's unsparing depiction of Guevara's downfall (in which the CIA was up to its knees, if not its neck) can also be taken as a cautionary tale about how violence begets violence. So now it's time for audiences to make the moral judgments that Soderbergh passes by.

David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University, was film critic of the Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest book is The B List.