You can’t say that Steven Soderbergh’s Che isn’t beautifully shot and scored. You can’t say that Benicio Del Toro doesn’t give himself completely to the title role. You can’t say that it’s not an extremely daring piece of cinema –– in fact, it takes incredible balls to make a film this long, this wonky, while giving the audience this little to actually care about. In four-plus hours, across which Del Toro transforms from mild-mannered 20-something physician to dutiful soldier to full-on disciplinarian bad ass, then pops up in Bolivia after Intermission as a crazed, wheezing optimist who leads a doomed mission fueled purely by his unshakable faith that past glories are repeatable, Soderbergh manages to show an almost complete lack of concern for the inner life of his protagonist. If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents, Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che’s public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the director hasn’t brought out of the material.
Soderbergh, who showed up to today’s post-NYFF screening press conference wearing a scruffy Che-reminiscent beard, admitted that he began working on the film (he and Del Toro started discussing the project in 2000) long before he managed to define his attraction to his subject. “Sometimes you say yes, and you’re not sure why you said yes,” the director said. “I went in with more of an idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do.”
“It wasn’t until the films were finished, right around Cannes, that I realized…it was about engagement versus disengagement. Every day in our lives, we’re making decisions. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realized that what was compelling to me about Che was that when he decided to engage, he engaged fully.”
If only the same could be said of the filmmaker. …Read more
It may seem a bit early to write 1700+ words on the greatness of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara epic, especially without having actually seen the films (titled The Argentine and Guerrilla), but that couldn’t stop Jeff Wells from contributing such a piece to The Huffington Post yesterday. At least the guy has read the screenplays, both penned by Peter Buchman, but otherwise it’s all a lot of confident speculation and hopeful anticipation, particularly for Benicio Del Toro’s performance, which Wells is sure will be garner Oscar talk (didn’t the casting alone garner such talk two years back?):
With Benicio del Toro, the moody and mesmerizing Marlon Brando-ish actor whose work keeps getting deeper and more fascinating, all but certain to stir Oscar talk for his performance as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the legendary Argentine/Cuban firebrand. Even if the Che movies turn out to be problematic, Del Toro can’t not whip ass. He’s too strange, too gifted. Guevara is too perfect a role for him. All the stars and planets are aligned.
…Read more
