I had a friend in high school who wore a Che Guevara T-shirt in a photo for the high school year book. Years later at a party, we were going through the year book and someone asked him about the shirt, "were you a communist?"
He explained that he had picked it up on vacation in California and just liked the way "the guy" looked--beard, long hair and beret. At the time, he thought "the guy" was some sort of rock star.
That level of ignorance persists, decades later. Che Guevara is an icon of anarchist, not left-wing mythology. His appeal wasn't his ideology, but the fact that he and the Castro boys succeeded in overthrowing the establishment. What happens after the overthrow is unimportant to Che fans, and yet its the most important part of the story.
Unfortunately its not the story that Steven Soderbergh wants to tell in his--are you read for this?--4 hour and 23 minute lionization of the revolutionary psychopath.
Let me say some nice things about the film. There is some lovely cinematography. There are nifty opening graphics of a map pointing out the various provinces of Cuba, although when the graphics re-appear after intermission and proceed to point out every single country in South America, it feels like a fourth grade geography lesson. Soderbergh seems to think that his audience is composed of idiots. I’m finished being nice, by the way.
Like Frost/Nixon, this will do no box office, but someone will nominate it for an award or two just to avoid total embarrassment.
It does however provide an opportunity within the movie review to learn something of the real events of the Cuban revolution and the kind of a-hole Che Guevara is.
...a sliver of truth does manage to peek through the darkness of disinformation in a scene in which Guevara, asthmatic, undernourished, gaining no traction in his insurgency against the Bolivian government and unable to make his horse move another inch, slides off of the poor creature and begins stabbing her. (This event, by the way, apparently really happened). Some in the audience moaned empathetically, as if the whole thing was so, so sad: first, el Vaquerito, now the horse! Yes, the incident is sad, but it’s not merely sad. It’s abnormal, terrifying. What kind of sadist stabs a horse just because he can’t make it walk? The answer is this: the same kind of sadist that presides over a gulag in which executions are carried out with dreadful, cold efficiency.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing, which comes in two parts.
