Soderbergh's Che: One-Ton Guerrilla

And so the endless campaign wraps up with a flurry of virtual leaders. Richard Nixon will always be part of America’s dream life, with or without David Frost; the Bush II legacy will linger for years, even as W. addresses a yearning for closure. Like our president-elect, Milk arrives from left field, right on time. But why Che Guevara, and why now? Who in 2008 could possibly be interested in a four-hour movie on the minutiae of guerrilla warfare?

Steven Soderbergh’s Che is an unabashed historical epic opening as an unprecedented historic event — or at least an old-fashioned road show. The movie’s two parts will show together for one week on a single Los Angeles screen, in advance of their individual releases early next year. You may wonder why, but then, ever since Che premiered in Cannes last May, Soderbergh’s superlatively crafted, dramatically compelling, emotionally distant account of Guevara’s participation in the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s and the disastrous Bolivian uprising a decade later has been baffling critics and audiences alike.

Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara

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More About

• Steven Soderbergh
• Che Guevara
• Cannes
• Benicio Del Toro
• Peter Buchman

The Motorcycle Diaries and 20th Century Fox’s long-ago debacle Che! were made to capitalize on the Guevara myth; each, in its way, served to infuriate either Che’s enemies or his fans. By contrast, Soderbergh’s epic is neither romantic nor even particularly partisan. While the real Che may be (or may once have been) cool, the filmmaker’s attitude is way cooler. Whatever heat star and co-producer Benicio Del Toro brings to the title role, Soderbergh’s project is to search for the technocrat, which is to say, himself, in the original revolutionary rock star.

Throughout Che, the emphasis is on process — indeed, Soderbergh acted as his own director of photography, under the name Peter Andrews. Moreover, the movie presents its subject almost entirely in the context of three events — the Cuban Revolution, the Bolivian debacle, and a 1964 trip to the United Nations. There were some at Cannes who accused Soderbergh and screenwriter Peter Buchman of evading the facts: Where was Che’s bureaucratic bungling and his persecution of political enemies? What about his love affairs? His adventures in the Congo? Why, others wanted to know, did Soderbergh withhold the ecstatic entrance into Havana? Everything must be deduced from Che’s behavior under actual or rhetorical fire — he is defined in terms of his desire and capacity to make history.

Seeing Che at Cannes, I thought it perhaps a great movie and certainly an admirably uncommercial one, describing it as “a skillfully didactic, nervily dialectical, feel-good, feel-bad combat film” that has “less in common with The Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’ La Commune (Paris, 1871) or even a structuralist extravaganza like Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale.” Upon a second viewing some months later, after Soderbergh normalized Che (mainly by tweaking the first half to soften its strangeness), his movie seemed, disappointingly, less formally rigorous — but even more scrupulous in its pursuit of an objective narrative. The filmmaker wanted to make history as well.

The man who put U.S. indies (and the old Miramax) on the map when his first film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, took the “audience award” at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Soderbergh has enjoyed the indie-ist career of any contemporary American filmmaker — whimsically alternating between big-budget crowd-pleasers and pretentious, scruffy experiments. Traffic came closest to reconciling these modes, but Che does as well. The movie’s first part has a classic Hollywood look, while the second is more rough-and-ready cinema vérité. In his interviews, Soderbergh has emphasized his use of a new lightweight, high-performance digital cine-camera to shoot Che, setting up, as Amy Taubin noted in Film Comment, an underlying equation between guerrilla warfare and guerrilla filmmaking.

Does this trivialize the movie’s subject? Only to the degree that making art is making a lesser form of history. Che gives full rein to a quixotic strain of Soderbergh’s work — the desire to use Franz Kafka as a fictional character, remake Tarkovsky’s Solaris, or, as in The Good German, create a ’40s movie in the 21st century. Ocean’s 11 is both a caper movie and a successfully pulled caper; Solaris is a movie about the imperfection of simulated memory that is also such a memory.

If Che seems self-reflexive, it’s because Soderbergh is less the driven auteur than a highly intelligent artisan who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. Assuming responsibility for this ambitious, risk-taking, possibly pointless project enabled him a means to identify with his impossibly legendary subject.

A month away from its 50th anniversary, the Cuban Revolution has not yet disappeared as a political issue and, in some respects, remains more contemporary than the Third World guerrilla struggles it inspired. Still, Soderbergh’s strategy demands that the viewer project a measure of pathos into Che — or at least an appreciation for the painful failure dramatized onscreen.