My column is non-existent this week but I've been seeing a lot of great movies lately. Coincidentally, two of them have to do with Latin America. One had at the helm a new young lion of movies, Cary Joji Fukunaga. The other had Stephen Soderbergh,  a perennial critics darling who made his bones on the independent circuit on his way to big time Hollywood excess. Both were flawed films. Both were powerful experiences worth having at the theatre. Themes that were relevant in one remained relevant and palpable in the other though one dealt with the past and the other with the present. Latin American culture is one of most pervasive dynamics affecting American society today and watching that tide wash over a continent from two different perspectives was exciting and refreshing. I might be the only person I know who looks forward to sitting through a four and a half hour movie...

 but I definitely wish people would stop harping on the length as though that is the only thing worth talking about with a film. If Soderbergh's Che isn't entirely successful it might be because it wasn't long enough. Fukunaga serves notice that a major player has entered the scene. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

Che, the thunderous new epic by Steven Soderbergh, is as complex and maddening as its central figure; ambitious, daring, at times brilliant, but also obtuse, hidden, almost conservative in its aspirations. Ironically, it seems to suffer from a crisis of purpose. What is the goal? There is no doubt that it is a monumental work of art. It will be an important film if only because Benicio Del Toro is one of the great actors in film and Ernesto “Che” Guevara is the role he was born to play. But the huge questions about Guevara are avoided and this feels like a crippling omission. If Guevara’s mystique was once that of the ultimate revolutionary, certainly it has morphed somewhat in recent years to that of the most complex, galvanizing and polarizing political icon of the twentieth century. Over the course of four and a half hours, we see Guevara in his rise to power during the Cuban revolution and his ultimate downfall in Bolivia but we don’t see how Guevara came to hold the ideological beliefs that he did or why and how he made many of the choices he made later on either in Cuba or in other countries. We get fleeting glimpses that only make it more maddening that we don’t get to see more.

The first half of Che (The Argentine) is extraordinary. It flashes back and forth between the war in the jungles and towns of Cuba, Che’s first meeting with Castro (a marvelous performance by Demian Bichir) in Mexico and Che’s famous visit to the UN in 1964. The scenes in New York hold the most promise. We see Che here, defiant, stubborn, sharp, comfortable in his power and in his accomplishments and still filled with revolutionary fire.  When the new Cuban government is attacked and there methods called into question we see where things might have gone wrong. The dangerous side of revolutions of course, is when the men who conduct them aren’t able adapt their methodology to a new circumstance. Once they’ve used war to achieve a goal, war becomes their only means to accomplish any goal. Che says “Yes, there have been executions.” And he refuses to recognize a problem.

  Indeed, it almost makes sense. Why the use of violence is okay in some instances and not in others has always confused me. Differentiating between a “terrorist attack” or an “act of war” is walking too fine a line for this critic. But we never see if that’s what Che is thinking. We’re not there when he signs the execution orders or deals with the ramifications of those decisions. Why do we just jump over his self-imposed(?) exile from the Cuban government? Why do we not follow him to the Congo? It’s a large story and usually I feel biopics try to cover too much territory in too little time so on one hand the selectivity is welcome. On the other hand it is hard to figure out what we’re supposed to take from the snippets of Che’s life that have been chosen.

Those snippets include almost entirely war: the nuts and bolts of battle, the real effort that goes behind leading a group of men, the little victories and setbacks that accompany a life steeped in violence. In both halves of the movie these scenes shine. War feels like work. But those brief moments in Mexico, the interview with Lisa Howard (Julia Ormond) and the UN confrontation are so expertly and easily pulled off we miss them when they’re gone. You feel like “we were onto something.” Here is where we would find out what Che thought.

           After all, in some sense it feels like Che’s revolution became too abstract an idea. What brings him up short in Africa and South America is his lack of connection to the environment. He doesn’t know the people. He hasn’t lived the situation that they’re in whatever the statistics might tell him. He doesn’t feel the need or know how to tailor his tactics, methods and rhetoric to the new environment – whether that environment is peace or a new nation on a different continent. Che, for all his reputation, was a controversial government official, and was not able to export his revolutionary methodology to other countries. The hows and whys of these failures need to be explored as much as the trials and tribulations of combat. The audience deserves this. Del Toro’s performance deserves this. All of the acting in the movie is first-rate but the movie belongs to Del Toro and when it leaves him, even for brief moments, you feel the lag. 

In the last decade, Benicio Del Toro has carved himself a niche as Hollywood’s most devastating wild card. He performs with a lack of effect or pretension rarely seen in a star of his stature. His singular ability is to feel true in any given moment, to derive his power from total honesty. His characters always have a tremendous amount going on behind the eyes. They always seem not just to know the meaning behind the words that other characters say but are also calculating the ramifications of their actions. All of these qualities come to bear in his rendition of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He alone is reason enough to see the movie. When, after being captured by the enemy, he asks his guard to release him you can see the guard almost seduced by Che’s naked charisma and you begin to understand the magnetism of this man and why it has affected the world so much.

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