Dave McCoy, MSN Movies Lead Editor | |
Last year at the Toronto Film Festival, fellow critic Jim Emerson (editor of RogerEbert.com, author of Scanners blog and MSN Movies contributor) showed me a photo of a T-shirt -- one of the funniest I've seen. On it was the recognizable close-up of Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Below his face were the words "I DON'T KNOW WHO THIS IS!!!"
The joke, of course, stems from the oversaturation of Che's iconic image, turning the Marxist into a counterculture icon and cheap symbol of individuality, bro. Walk around a college town and you'll see Che's bereted head on the chests of freshman who just took their first poli-sci class, post-hippies waving it like a freak flag, or guilty frat boys trying to forget they just joined the "establishment" by paying for four years of friendship. (Hey, don't get me wrong; it's part of youth. I opted for a Malcolm X T-shirt and a "Free Nelson Mandela" bumper sticker on my Honda Prelude ... that my dad bought for me.) There is truth to the T-shirt, though. People know the image, but beyond "Viva la revolución" and his power-to-the-people message, what do they know of the man? When walking into Steven Soderbergh's 4-hour, 28-minute, two-part movie, titled simply "Che," I hoped the director would illuminate the ignorant and offer a balanced look at a complex, contradictory, controversial figure in 20th-century history. Hell, after 4 hours and 28 minutes, we had better be enlightened.
Well, let's just say that after this film, if anyone sees it, more Che T-shirts will fly off the shelves because apparently the revolutionist is a saint! (Between Mike Tyson and Angelina Jolie in the "Changeling," there's a lot of talk of saints at Cannes.)
Don't get me wrong: Soderbergh's opus is a staggeringly impressive piece of work. It's pure storytelling, because the director has dropped all his self-reflexive tricks. I can't fathom how he made this thing. One of its greatest achievements, however, is also one of its biggest flaws. I don't think I've seen something this large in scope and length be so minutely, acutely focused. Despite covering 10 to 15 years, it's not sprawling. In fact, the two halves are reverse images of each other, or two sides of the same peso. Soderbergh is not interested in a thorough character study of Che; he views him as an ideology and cause that's mobilized.