_Che_: The _Heeb_ Review

by Jed Oelbaum

Ernesto Guevara, doctor, Jedi freedom fighter, popular T-shirt design and the subject of Steven Soderbergh’s fawning four and a half hour Che, was executed in Bolivia, already beaten down by the rigors of his failed insurgency, still high off the fumes of Cuba’s revolutionary success. The Bolivian campaign, which makes up the second half of this biopic, famously crashed and burned, failing to energize or recruit common Bolivians, flaming out in an ever increasing quantity of death, desperation and facial hair. It’s indicative of Soderbergh’s focus, and the nature of folk heroism perhaps, that the story deem insignificant any other character besides Che–at best, the cast of characters who surround him are but fodder for the legend. The film’s starter story does a better job in its depiction of Cuba’s fantastic, totally radical, trying, but mostly fun revolution, in which a bossy young lawyer named Fidel Castro helps Che cut his gums on guerilla action, and learn valuable lessons in leadership, struggle, and the true meaning of Christmas communism.

It’s hard to imagine what the two parts of the film, written as separate entities (“The Argentine” and “Guerrilla”), would be like to watch individually; the first feeling kinda incomplete in scope, a series of victories that left Guevara teetering on the edge of his failures, both as an apparatchik for the new Cuban government and in his future military campaigns. The second, I imagine, would be completely indecipherable, a series of lush jungle shots, whizzing bullets, and indistinguishable beardos, leaning completely on Benicio del Toro’s excellent performance, and falling from it’s first moments towards the anticlimax of his notoriously shitty death, a heady, straight-up two hours of bummer.

The first half of the film, in Spanish subtitles, cuts between overdubs representing interviews with the foreign press, grainy black-and-white renditions of Guevara’s time in New York City, and the greens, browns, and chalky stone of Cuba’s outlying regions. To be sure, the movie is nicely shot, and succeeds in maintaining its illusion throughout; the martial procession through the endless foliage, the fraternity and violence of guerilla warfare, and the whirling, bloody jubilance of a people’s victory all come together to paint the popular version of Guevara’s legend.

Glaringly omitted were the events at La Cabana, a converted prison where without trial or defense, hundreds of “anti-revolutionaries” were executed under Che’s command. In an interview with The Guardian, Soderbergh says of the episode:

“As for La Cabana, that wasn’t a period I was interested in portraying because I was making a diptych about two military campaigns…La Cabana was really turned into a Roman circus, where I think even the people in power look back on that as excessive. However, every regime, in order to retain power when it feels threatened, acts excessively.”

Moral relativism aside, the lionization of Guevara extends through both halves, with del Toro’s noble, wheezing poet/warrior making for an effective, if distant hero; galvanizing the people, fighting the fight and eventually laying it down for what he believed in.

Understanding Che is to understand two films, shot in different locations, on different types of film, and aside from del Toro, an almost entirely different cast. “The Argentine,” despite its uneven placement in Guevara’s life and times, is a pretty solid piece of storytelling, with a couple of larger-than-life characters, relevant context (the New York stuff, etc.) and some exciting battle scenes. “Guerrilla” builds its tensions on warfare alone, the duck and cover, the ambush, the exchange of fire through the trees; a violent dirge for a doomed martyr. It fades into what feels like three scenes: training, shooting and dying. Together, the two parts make for an imbalanced experience, captivating at times, well-performed and ultimately, just too goddamn long.

What do you think?