The excellent new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which is devoted to the fifitieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, includes a J. Hoberman essay on Steven Soderbergh's epic biopic Che, starring Benecio Del Toro as Ernesto Guevara. "Within eighteen months of his death, this instant immortal had been embalmed—in the form of Egyptian matinee idol Omar Sharif—by Twentieth Century Fox, as the subject of a tediously self-important and ridiculously old-fashioned Hollywood biopic. Early evidence of the hyperreal: noting the production’s budget, John Leonard observed in the New York Times Magazine that making a movie about revolution was considerably more expensive than the revolution itself, 'about $10,000 an hour.' ” Hoberman describes the intentions behind that clueless turkey (which co-starred Jack Palance, in a Silly Putty nose, as Fidel Castro), as having been "in the tradition of Fox’s 1952 Viva Zapata—a melancholy, heartfelt, prestigious, star-spangled tribute to revolutionary failure" starring a "hardcore New Left action tough guy." Actually, as Che's resurrection via T-shirt image (the history of which was described in the recent documentary Chevolution shows, he was the guerrilla as rock star. Consciously or not, most of his modern fans understand him as being part of the lineage of hip rock martyrs that includes Jimi, Janis, the lost Rolling Stone, and the Lizard King. More recently, Gael Garcia Bernal played the hunky young (pre-"Che") Ernesto in the Sundance-friendly The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a road trip the lad took with a buddy, a trip that was immortalized in a book that appeared more than twenty years after his death. Directed by Walter Salles (with Robert Redford acting as executive producer), it was a gorgeous-looking movie that gave receptive audiences the chance to admire it's hero's liquid eyes and bone structure while he visited peasants in pastoral settings and felt his yet-unformed social conscience become all tingly.
Is Soderbergh's Che a history lesson or the latest act of what Hoberman calls "co-optive commodification"? It "remains a film object—a thing to be experienced. The movie demands to take its time, with both parts taken in at a single sitting." Hoberman, who saw the film at last year's Cannes Film Festival before Soderbergh took a scalpel to it, reports that "Many initial viewers were confounded to the degree that Che appeared as a non- or even an anti-biopic. Despite a stellar performance by Benicio Del Toro, who had initiated the project some years ago with Soderbergh as producer and Terrence Malick attached as writer and director, Che presents its subject almost entirely as the protagonist in the context of two specific events. Moreover, the director seemed to keep his distance and reserve his judgment. Skillfully didactic, as well as nervily dialectical, this feel-good/feel-bad combat film thus had less in common with the touchy-feely Motorcycle Diaries than with Peter Watkins’s spare, self-reflexive reconstruction of the Paris Commune, La Commune (Paris, 1871)." However, since its premiere, "Soderbergh has tweaked his movie's first half in ways that soften its strangeness and blunt its intellectual range." These additions, which interrupt the story of the revolution with flash-forwards to Che's life as a political celebrity during a trip to New York, serve the purpose of "Annotating the past with the 'present' and tightening the movie’s overall sound/image connections," even as "these inserts do allow for another sort of dialectic, but their presence serves to subtly normalize Soderbergh’s distancing strategy. (Or what was taken to be his strategy. “With all the subtitles, we thought it was Jean-Luc Godard,” a colleague joked.)"
"Che," Hoberman writes, "is an act of will rather than a work of art, overtly concerned with technical issues—the revolution’s and its own." In short, it is a movie by Steven Soderbergh, a director who (with his first feature, sex, lies, and videotape) helped invent independent American moviemaking as a concept (and, in part, as a marketing concept); who, with his comeback movie, Out of Sight, showed how just how much smarts and technical pizzazz could be applied to a solid piece of romantic-action-comedy goods while accepting the material on its chosen level; and who has spent the last decade or so veering from one extreme to the next, trying to find the ideal balance between commercial work that won't rot the brain and experimental work that tries to speak to at least part of the mass audience. As Hoberman sees it, "Che is superb filmmaking—forcefully edited, purposefully repetitive. Everything is foreshadowed; each sequence has its parallel. There is no scene that cannot be seen as part of an ongoing argument." But how many movies made by big Hollywood players wouldn't be embarrassed by a phrase like "an ongoing argument"?"Soderbergh is less a driven auteur or even an enthusiastic cinephile than he is a highly intelligent technician who sets himself a problem and goes about solving it. "
