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Along with his older friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), Guevara set out to explore the length of South America, traveling from Buenos Aires across Argentina to Chile, then up the Andes to Peru and over to the western part of the Amazon, and finally up into Venezuela in the north. Though he came from a relatively progressive family, the Che we first see appears to have no idea of what he's in for. He finds out soon enough, though, running across all sorts of examples of inequality and evidently feeling more revolutionary all the time.

It's easy to see why Guevara came to feel the way he did, at least through Salles' camera. Traveling on a budget for which the term "shoestring" would be a generous description, Guevara and Granado experienced life through the eyes of the poor and downtrodden, and made acquaintances with many of them. Even at a leper colony, Guevara felt more at home among the lepers, whom he felt were being unfairly segregated (as they weren't contagious while in treatment, but were still confined to a separate bank of the river from the staff). That experience serves as a microcosm for the story of the whole film - Guevara and Granado preferred the company of the common people, those who were considered as societal lepers in the emerging capitalist states of South America.

The problem the film has is that while it says "This is not a tale of heroic feats," it clearly lionizes Che in such a manner that the rest of his life's work - mostly participating in various and frequently unsuccessful Communist revolutions - is implicitly condoned. Che's ideal of equality is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but there's a large difference between theory and practice, as every Communist state in history has shown. We get the first suggestion of Che's slightly less friendly and slightly more armed tendencies when he tells Alberto that a revolution without guns will never work. The film's political leanings solidify at the end when it explains how Guevara was "murdered," conveniently ignoring that he was in the process of attempting a (very poorly-executed) revolt in Bolivia at the time, and was captured and executed by his political enemies, something he had done himself while working with the Cuban revolution. Of course, it's different here because Che was such a great guy. Uh huh. A film cannot be entirely divorced from its politics, and those manifested here hurt the work overall.

It's too bad, because if the film just fictionalized what it had, stripping the "armed Communist revolutionary" baggage from the main character it was holding up for praise, it would be pretty much amazing. The story sprawls a bit, but it feels like a quintessential road movie, with two friends having the experience of their lives. Plot concerns like "dramatic tension" are somewhat secondary in this type of film. Instead, characters are pretty important, and we get a lot on Guevara and Granado, all of which is good if, again, you strip the implied future. It's a divorce that can't really be made, but if we put it into the back of our minds for two hours, it's not that big a deal.

South America itself plays a huge role in the film as well. Salles chose a lot of absolutely gorgeous scenery, setting up a lot of the film as a virtual tourist brochure for various countries. Then there's the way in which the various areas shape Guevara and Granado, mostly the former, in sociopolitical fashion.

Also very important to the film are its two anchor performances. Bernal gives a mesmerizing, haunting performance, doing all he can to embody Guevara's transformation. He's not likely to get much awards push if any, but he's the real deal. Every emotion is perfect. De La Serna is similarly outstanding, albeit in a role that mostly serves as Che's comic relief sidekick.

It's great to look at and the actors are a treat, but the socialist politics of The Motorcycle Diaries make it slightly harder to take seriously. It's not just that Guevara grew up to be a Communist guerrilla, it's that the film pays lip service to the idea that it's really just exploring a trip Guevara took, before launching headlong into showing how right he was about the oppressed peoples and such. And he was right about the oppressed peoples, but his methods weren't the greatest.

Like Hero, which came out in the U.S. earlier this year, The Motorcycle Diaries is a film that is very good, but would have been better if it had made some better political choices. Guevara's iconic status ensured that his story would never have been fictionalized, but if Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera really wanted to do something with their characters, it might have been better to tone down the Communist hero worship.

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originally posted: 11/19/04 19:36:16
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