Rebel, Rebel, Your Face Is A Mess | Benicio Del Toro goes down shooting in Part Two of Che.
CHE: PART TWO (GUERRILLA)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Benicio Del Toro, Lou Diamond Phillips, Franka Potente. Opens Fri, Apr 10.
**1/2
All right, where were we?
When last we checked in on the hero of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, it was early in 1959. The Battle of Santa Clara had been won, thanks in no small part to Guevara’s able command of a small, outnumbered band of rebel fighters, preparing the way for Castro to roll victoriously into Havana and seize the reins of power. We also got a few brief glimpses of Che Guevara, now a blazing symbol of left-wing revolt, during his 1964 visit to New York to address the United Nations.
As Part Two of Che (a.k.a. Guerrilla) opens, it’s 1965. Soderbergh has changed aspect ratios and Guevara has changed his base of operations, knocking around Africa and Europe using forged documents and disguised as a middle-aged man, before winding up in Bolivia, where terrible poverty and an exploitative mining industry seem to provide the ideal conditions for Guevara to foment another Cuban-style uprising. And so, he rounds up another small band of guerrillas, and with a little behind-the-scenes assistance from Castro, sets up a training camp in a remote patch of Bolivian forest. He goes by the codename “Ramon” these days, but whatever you call him, when you’ve got the famous Che Guevara on your side, victory seems assured.
The key word there is “seems.” Guerrilla spends its 135-minute running time minutely documenting how the Bolivian campaign went wrong. The reasons for the rebellion’s failure are simple enough to summarize: the Bolivian Communist party declined to lend Guevara its support, while the CIA was only too happy to train and supply the Bolivian army. Plenty of other things went wrong too: the Bolivian peasant population, distrustful of outsiders by nature, never rallied behind Guevara the way the Cubans had; and Guevara lost his communication links to Cuba and the outside world early on in the campaign, resulting in morale-draining food shortages.
As in Part One, Soderbergh’s depiction of these developments is intentionally, stubbornly anti-dramatic. There isn’t a traditional dramatic arc to this movie, with a series of conventional scenes, leavened with colourful incidents and subplots and strategically placed doses of mood-lightening humour, designed to prepare you for an emotional climax; instead, Soderbergh takes you on a long, gruelling march through Bolivia with his eyes trained solely on the next tree, the next hill in front of him.
There aren’t really even any characters in this movie — Soderbergh makes practically no effort to differentiate the various soldiers in Guevara’s company from each other, and even Guevara himself is a remote figure whose innermost thoughts are kept secret from his men and the audience. He’s the guy with the thickest beard; that’s about the most you can say about him. (When Guevara loses his cool and berates the stubborn mule he’s been forced to ride during one of his serious bouts of asthma, it’s startling precisely because it’s one of the few scenes in the entire movie devoted to an individual’s emotions rather than the collective experience.)
When I reviewed Part One, I said I’d hold off until I’d seen the whole thing before talking about Benicio Del Toro’s interpretation of Guevara. But it’s a hard performance to evaluate even after having seen the complete thing — it’s so subservient to Soderbergh’s overall conception of the film that part of me wonders if you can even call it a performance at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. Del Toro reminded me, in a weird way, of how the non-professional actor Gabe Nevins functions in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park — he’s got the right look and the right energy, but the only inner life he has is what the viewer projects onto him.
Guerrilla opens by showing you a map on which, one by one, slowly, systematically, the various countries of South America are highlighted — even though the movie never takes place in most of them and memorizing the map won’t help you understand the story any better. That’s Che in a nutshell — it reminds me of that hilarious moment in the audio commentary on the DVD of The Limey where screenwriter Lem Dobbs rails at Soderbergh for spending so much screentime on establishing that there’s a shortcut down the hill from the house where Peter Fonda’s character lives. “It’s your fetishistic nature!” he shouts. “You want to be very clear that there’s a side street, but you don’t want any backstory for the human relationships or characters. But goddammit, people are going to know there’s a second way down that hill!”
“Yeah,” Soderbergh coolly replies. “I like knowing where people are. I don’t care who they are, I just want to know where they are.”
After four and a half hours of Che, I think I wanted less “where” and more “who.” And maybe less Che as well — like the Che T-shirt stretched across Luis Guzman’s potbelly in The Limey, this movie manages to seem thin yet bloated at the same time.
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