/ 18 December 2009

Guerrillas in the mist

The second part of Steven Soderbergh’s two-movie biopic of Che Guevara arrives just as most of its likely viewers, probably, are realising they’ve missed the first part. But perhaps it doesn’t matter much: they are basically the same film done twice.

Each deals with a particular guerrilla campaign led by Guevara, though the endings are of course different. Che, Part I: The Argentinean ended with the victory of the revolutionaries in Cuba. Che, Part II: The Guerrilla covers Guevara’s Bolivian campaign, which has to be deemed a failure, not least because he was killed.

Both films are based on Guevara’s own accounts of his rural campaigns. He recorded what he and his warriors were up to and tried to think through the implications for other such uprisings. He was nothing if not concerned with spreading the gospel of revolution around the world, and his written works might be subtitled How to Be a Successful Revolutionary. Well, they might if, in fact, he had succeeded more than once.

Soderbergh’s Che movies leave a lot out — about 10 years. Between part one and part two would have been Guevara’s time in the new Cuban government. He was in charge of executing members of the old régime and any supporters of the wrong ideologies, as well as being minister of agriculture, head of the national bank and responsible for military training – a rather diverse portfolio. Also falling in the gap between the two movies is his time in the Congo trying unsuccessfully to foster a revolutionary movement there.

Perhaps Soderbergh could make a short movie one day, called Che, Part One-and-a-Half: The Missing Years. For Che, Part II: The Guerrilla opens a decade after the Cuban campaign, which makes its title a bit odd — Guevara was a guerrilla in part one, wasn’t he?

In any case, we reconnect with Guevara as he embarks on his Bolivian adventure. Which feels an awful lot like the Cuban adventure. There’s a lot of the same traipsing through tropical greenery, being shot at now and then, giving ideological lessons, having asthma attacks, writing in his diary. At least this time around there’s no Fidel Castro to pop up every so often to tell Guevara what to do next, as he kept doing in part one. Guevara’s hair comes off, the beard is shaved, then both grow again into the curly romantic-revolutionary locks of the famous poster boy.

Part two is more straightforward than part one: no tripartite narrative structure or flitting back and forth in time. But that also makes it duller than part one, which was already something of a trudge. This despite Benicio del Toro’s intense and credible, if rather inward, portrayal of Guevara, and the attractively fluid cinematography (by Soderbergh himself). The films are a useful and apparently accurate portrayal of those two campaigns, so they make a decent history lesson, in a studious sort of way.

Still, it’s hard not to feel that one would have preferred a single Che biopic that compressed the campaigning periods and covered some of the other things he did. He may have been a guerrilla, but that’s not all he did. Hence the paradox of this duo-biopic: it’s good without being very gripping at all.