Soderbergh’s account of Che Guevara’s Bolivian campaign is exact, patient and refuses to explain anything, and Benicio del Toro is quietly remarkable in it. It is a good film that asks more of your evening than most and does not always repay the middle hour.
Steven Soderbergh’s second Che film opens in Havana in 1965, with Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) reading out a letter in which Ernesto Che Guevara gives up everything the Cuban revolution had given him and leaves to start again somewhere else. Somewhere else is Bolivia. Guevara (Benicio del Toro) arrives in La Paz a year later as a balding businessman, joins a handful of Cuban veterans at a farm in the south-east and waits for a revolution that never gets going. The film runs 135 minutes and Soderbergh’s decision is to show the campaign day by day and not to explain it.
It is a good film and a stubborn one. If you want to know why a man walks away from a ministry to starve in a forest, it will not say. The script, credited to Peter Buchman, Benjamin A. Van Der Veen and, to our surprise, Terrence Malick, keeps close to Guevara’s own campaign diary. We admired that. We also spent a stretch around the hour mark wanting something, anything, to happen, and we suspect Soderbergh would say that is roughly how the men in the column felt.
Soderbergh shot it himself, in greens and browns. The camera stays with the guerrillas, hand-held, at shoulder height, and the horizon is rarely in the frame. The skirmishes are short, confusing and over, and Pablo Zumárraga cuts them without slow motion or a shot that tells you who is winning; you count the bodies afterwards. Alberto Iglesias’s score is a few strings that arrive late and leave early. Antxón Gómez gives the camp a tin-roofed farmhouse and an oven dug into a bank, and Bina Daigeler’s fatigues start clean and end in rags without anyone saying a word about it.
Del Toro spends most of the film listening. Early on, the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party comes to tell him the party will not help, and del Toro says almost nothing while the campaign dies in front of him. With the two visitors from outside, Régis Debray (Marc-André Grondin) and Ciro Bustos (Gastón Pauls), he is patient and dry. The moment that got at us was smaller. Guevara has run out of asthma medicine, and he sits against a tree while the column waits, and del Toro breathes as though each breath has to be argued for. We forgot he was famous and worried that he was ill.
Carlos Bardem’s Moisés Guevara brings recruits down from the mines and half of them do not last a month. Cristian Mercado’s Inti is the one local who believes. Eduard Fernández’s Ciro Algarañaz, the farmer next door, decides the strangers must be making cocaine, which is the funniest thing in the film and does them no good at all. The peasants, asked for food and silence, give a little of the first and none of the second. Joaquim de Almeida’s President Barrientos gets a handful of scenes with American advisers, and Soderbergh shoots the government in the same flat daylight as the guerrillas. Nobody is lit as a villain.
Because Soderbergh will not explain, the middle hour repeats itself: march, hunger, argument, march. Most critics have said so, though the more admiring ones take the repetition as the point. We half agree. The skirmishes are indistinguishable on purpose, but a film can be right about tedium and still be tedious, and there are twenty minutes here where the discipline looks like a shrug. How it ends is a matter of record. We will not describe how Soderbergh stages it, except to say that he does not change his method for it, and that we were glad.
Che: Part One had a war that was won. This one has a greener country, a smaller band and a man walking towards something everyone in the audience knows about. It stands on its own, and we think it is the better film. It is a 15 certificate and the violence is brief and unglamorous. Watch it with a meal already inside you. It is a hungry film, and it makes you notice.
