List Price:   $12.98 Price:   find out more information

Buy posters from this movie

Che, as a young, upper middle class medical student on the verge of adulthood, decides to postpone his last semester in medical school to undertake an 8,000-mile journey across the South American continent with his longtime friend, Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), a biochemist about to turn thirty. The journey is timed to one last, prolonged bout of adolescence, freedom without responsibility. Granado offers Che picaresque adventures on the back of an antiquated motorcycle, a 1939 Norton, without the noisome intrusion and oversight of joyless parental figures. The Motorcycle Diaries is also at its most engaging (and entertaining) in the early scenes that follow Che and Alberto’s misadventures on their decrepit motorcycle. These scenes are imbued with a sense of humor and levity missing from the remainder of the film, when Che’s encounters with the dispossessed turns Che and the film toward humorless sentimentality.

Che and Alberto first stop at the well-manicured ranch of wealthy family friends. While Che has a youthful crush on the daughter, Chichina (Mía Maestro), Alberto is defined and driven by his overactive libido (Alberto succeeds in seducing the maid). Che, in contrast, is mostly chaste in his attitude toward the women around him, preferring, at first, traditional loyalty to his girlfriend, and later, a misjudged dalliance with the wife of a motorcycle mechanic. When otherwise faced with pursuing physical pleasures or adhering to his idealistic principles, he chooses the latter. Che takes the Hippocratic oath seriously.

Che’s character is further defined by his natural reticence, and a shy, physically awkward nature (Che is at his most human in several scenes when he attempts to dance, failing each time). The film is at its strongest here: allowing the audience to look behind Salles attempt to mythologize Che. Unfortunately, Salles prefer to turn Che into a demigod/revolutionary, rather than a human being whose experiences shaped his political and social beliefs (some would argue, for the worst). The mythologizing is at its worst in the final act, with Che and Alberto's arrival at a leper colony heralding the arrival of the "pure" Che, who, no longer distracted by physical desire, turns his undivided attention to serving the leper community. Che also upends the social hierarchy between the doctors, the staff, and the lepers, first by choosing not to wear gloves while visiting or treating the lepers and, later, in a heavy-handed attempt at symbolism, swimming across the Amazon to visit the lepers on his birthday (Salles even engages in overcooked Christian symbolism, as the lepers carry an exhausted Che on their shoulders).

The Che Guevara we encounter in The Motorcycle Diaries lacks psychological complexity or depth. Che, is more observer than actor, and a passive, reactive character whose experiences are almost always secondary and of minimal consequences to the other characters he interacts with along his journey: he may be a witness to the injustices and indignities suffered by others (described onscreen by non-professional actors), but he suffers or experiences little on his own, with the exception of occasional homelessness and hunger that can be easily ameliorated by a telegram home requesting money from his upper middle-class parents. There is no sense of real risk, real danger, or, outside of his ambivalent relationship with Alberto, anything approaching an external conflict, except in the abstract class and social system Che encounters on his journey. Conflict, if handled correctly, highlights the difficult moral dilemmas faced by the protagonist, and the protagonist's responses result in personal change and growth. Here, Che is relegated to filling his notebooks with the personal stories of the peasants and patients he encounters along his journey.

For example, in an early encounter between Che, Alberto, and a native couple searching for work at a nearby mine, Che's passivity is clearly evident. The work at the mine is presumably harsh and dangerous, with men selected daily for employment by a manager for the mine. What could have been a more persuasive segment in the film is undermined by Salles' choice to allow the couple to tell their story directly to the camera as Alberto and Che sit nearly, raptly listening, but never showing the couple's mistreatment first-hand. Second-hand accounts of personal experiences, like the ones featured in The Motorcycle Diaries, lack both urgency and immediacy.

A director of Salles' obvious talent should have realized the inherent problems in focusing his film on a passive, reactive protagonist (and finding workarounds, even if it meant fictionalizing Che's story further for dramatic purposes), but instead Salles chose to misuse (or willfully misunderstand) a visual, dramatic medium that's dependent on character choice and action to fully engage an audience. Instead, South American social, political, and cultural history is presented schematically and all too simplistically, and Che's later development into doctrinaire revolutionary is left disconnected from the earlier, mythologized Che. The audience can only surmise, without additional evidence, the reasons and experiences behind Che's subsequent transformation into a revolutionary leader, a leader who willingly accepted violence as a necessary instrument of revolution.

As political tract or conventional narrative, "The Motorcycle Diaries" proves to be a major disappointment, certainly undeserving of the accolades showered on it by critics seduced by its (fatally simplistic) leftists politics or Gaul Garcia Bernal’s charismatic central performance. Despite Bernal’s valiant efforts, his Che is less human being than an idealized figure from the near past. Perhaps Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming biopic, with Benicio del Toro as Che, will give audiences the Che of history, a complex, flawed idealist turned dogmatic, authoritarian revolutionary (and all that entails).

Share |

link directly to this review at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8513&reviewer=402
originally posted: 09/03/05 23:38:17
 printer-friendly format