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Benicio Del Toro in Che: Part Two |
Director loses battle to tell real Che story
CHE: PART TWO
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Certificate 15
THERE is a huge element of fence-sitting running through this film and, in an attempt to be balanced, director Steven Soderbergh has failed to take what has all the elements of a marvellous piece of historical story-telling and instead has produced a rather lame war film.
Che’s life was an epic, but this is far from it.
While his behaviour still splits those on the Left and Right, this anodyne portrayal glosses over so much it has made this film palatable even to the residents of Miami.
Part Two of Soderbergh’s life of Che Guevara focuses on the Argentinian’s time in the Bolivian mountains as he tried to bring the Cuban revolution to South America.
We follow him as he pulls together a rather ragged army of communists and agrarian revolutionaries to usurp the military dictatorship and build a fairer society. As we know, his attempt failed and Soderbergh follows the action as he tries to create a mass movement.
We pick up the action from the appearance in Bolivia of a tall, balding man called Ramon. It is Che is disguise and he has come to the mountains to ferment another peasant-based revolution, using the methods he had learned in Cuba.
But while the mountains look fantastic, the performances believable and the soundtrack brilliant – leather combat boots creaking, old guns being cocked and insects buzzing – there is a huge hole in the middle of this bio-pic.
First, Soderbergh skirts round so much back story as to make the historical context redundant.
We hear nothing of why Che chose Bolivia; nothing of what he did between the fall of the Batista regime in 1958 and his appearance in the mountains almost 10 years later; nothing of his work as a member of Castro’s government.
We also hear almost nothing as to why the Bolivian communists, mainly based in the cities, refused to help Che’s armed uprising – a crucial factor in his failure.
And, away from the politics, we learn little of the man. How hard was it for Che to resign his posts in Cuba, renounce his citizenship and leave his wife and five children behind?
And all we know of the Bolivian government’s response to the guerilla war from this film is that they were pretty good at killing heroes.
Not only did they account for Butch and Sundance, they also murdered Che. And that, I’m afraid, is it. |
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