Despite being reduced to a popular T-shirt image, which is only a little better than being condensed onto a bumper sticker, Ernesto "Che" Guevara has not only survived but thrived as a symbol. A symbol of what exactly is hard to know in a society where, at least according to legend, one millennial asked another if the face on his Che T-shirt belonged to George Harrison. Likely, few of the customers of Che products (a concept that would have horrified the real-life Guevara) are Marxists, dedicated revolutionaries or even have much idea who he was beyond a virile-looking rebel with a cause who died young before he could turn into an old wind bag.
But during the last 20 years, when many young people embraced Donald Trump as their role model and mindlessly adopted the dogma of Alan Greenspan, Che became the anti-Trump, a countercultural image of dissent to those who never wanted to apprentice for some arrogant, boorish developer-speculator-investment banker. Historical context was almost beside the point. Walter Salles' film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) painted Guevara as a youthful seeker, a wandering Latin American Kerouac, his hands yet unstained by the blood of revolution. With Che Part One, Steven Soderbergh brings Guevara to Havana at the head of a revolutionary victory parade.
The bare outline of the story is mythic and Soderbergh has invested heavily in the myth. From his Mexican exile, Guevara (played by a well cast Benicio del Toro) boarded a leaky boat with Fidel Castro and a band of 80 rebels. They invaded Cuba like a band of apostles, convinced of the righteousness of their seemingly impossible mission. For Guevara the ranks of the revolutionaries were a surrogate priesthood, a calling to fulfill the world's potential. As quoted in the film, he said, "A true revolutionary is guided by love for humanity, justice and truth."
The paradox of Guevara's love for humanity, as for the grand inquisitors of Christianity, was that it involved killing people. The path to the dawn on the horizon would be littered with the dead.
The structure of Soderbergh's film is interesting. Using Guevara's 1964 address to the UN General Assembly and an interview he granted during his New York visit as the framework, Soderbergh walks the revolutionary through his campaign in Cuba over a series of lengthy flashbacks. The 1964 scenes, shot in black and white, recreate the fuzzy texture of '60s television footage. The flashbacks are in color, filmed in natural light using the new RED digital camera, its resolution higher than its grainy predecessors.
The content is largely hagiographic, with little psychological insight into its protagonist. Soderbergh accepts the face Guevara presented to the world as the idealistic physician who treated the poor in between leading a guerilla war against the venal Cuban dictator Batista. His moral rectitude was strict: Guevara executed his own men for rape or stealing from peasants and even forced one of his commanders to return a stolen car. While the details may be correct, Soderbergh fails to illuminate the man behind the Commandante. Eschewing Hollywood conventions of dramatizing or sentimentalizing heroes, Soderbergh leaves us with a beret-wearing mask, a golden-tongued master of rhetoric with no apparent internal life.
Although Che Part One is only a few minutes longer than two hours, it often drags on like one of Fidel's famous speeches with flashes of brilliant oratory amid the rambling verbiage. Che Part Two will conclude in martyrdom as the revolutionary, still in his thirties, lays down his life for the cause.
