Film Review: Che Shaun Randol | December 22, 2008 Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org
At a party before the New York City screening of Che, director Steven Soderbergh said the reason he stretched Che to 257 minutes was because there was just too much story to tell about the revolutionary in a mere two hours. Later, at the same party, I asked a seasoned journalist and avid film viewer (who had just seen Che)his reaction to the film. While he enjoyed the film on the whole, to him it seemed that the jungle scenes were repetitive, ultimately making the film too long. Having now seen the full four and a half-hour film I can attest that, while their opinions are disparate, both Soderbergh and the journalist are right. Che opened in limited release as one film on December 12, and will run as two films in January. It begins essentially where the last cinematic Che hit, The Motorcycle Diaries, left off. In that film, before Ernesto Guevara becomes Che, we witness the transformation of a naïve young man into a worldly Bolivarian. He has aspirations of uniting the South American continent, and realizes militant revolution is the only way to do so. Fans of the camaraderie, expansive cinematography, and adventure found in Diaries will appreciate the film's Part One. Part Two is a decidedly different movie altogether. Che is essentially two movies joined at the hip, but both offer intriguing portraits of the man on the ubiquitous t-shirts. Che begins in Mexico at a small dinner gathering where young revolutionaries, namely Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) and Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Benicio del Toro), decry the injustices of imperialism and capitalism, and lay the groundwork for the 26th of July Movement to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Four and a half hours (and one decade) later the film closes with the execution of Che in a remote, Bolivian village, having failed to foment another Latin American revolution. Not everything that Che partook in, however between these episodes is covered in Soderbergh's sympathetic hagiography.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5763