Steven Soderbergh’s “Che”

I was apprehensive about Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” before seeing it yesterday, mostly fearing a Hollywood director’s attempt to “interpret” Che. While I didn’t expect anything as outrageous as the 1969 “Che!” starring Omar Sharif as Che and Jack Palance (!) as Fidel Castro, which Roger Ebert described as having a dramatic level that “aspires toward comic strips,” I wondered what the director of “Oceans 11” might possibly have to say about a revolutionary socialist.

As it turns out, “Che” is a serious and honest attempt to represent at least one aspect of Che Guevara’s career, namely the guerrilla fighter. The movie is divided in two parts, one based on “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War” and the other on the Bolivian diary. As a sign of Soderbergh’s bona fides, he used Jon Lee Anderson as a consultant for part one. Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara is quite good, up until the point when revolutionaries begin governing. Anderson was happy to write about Guevara’s heroism in battle, but much less willing to give credit to the socialist experiment now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.

It should be added that Soderbergh has serious ambitions as a film-maker, despite projects like “Oceans 11” that pay the rent (and which obviously he has fun making.) I strongly recommend “Bubble“, a technically innovative murder mystery involving blue-collar workers in the rust belt. Another Soderbergh film that critics regard as high-minded and daring is “Traffic”, a policier about the Mexican drug trade into the U.S. Soderbergh’s movie was based on the British TV movie “Traffik” that focused on the connections between those involved in the Pakistani heroin trade, from lowly poppy growers to super-rich exporters, and the British users, including the daughter of an anti-drug crusading MP. As I tried to explain in my review of “Traffic”, Soderbergh failed to deliver the kind of subtle class analysis found in the British teleplay. Indeed, despite all the critical raves, he sought nothing more than to make an elevated version of “Miami Vice” as this excerpt from my review would make clear.

Soderbergh is quite open about his desire to flatter law enforcement agencies in the USA, while simultaneously maintaining a hip “war on drugs can not succeed” ‘tude. In a profile that appears in the Jan. 3-9 Village Voice, Soderbergh states

“I didn’t want to come off like we had answers. The idea that some silly filmmaker after two years could sort it out would be outrageous. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the public debate and I guess this is one of the few times I felt a movie could actually help. The funny thing is, everybody who sees it thinks it puts their point of view across, and I was expecting exactly the opposite. We had a screening in Washington for Customs, DEA, and the Department of Justice and they all came out saying they really liked it. The following night, there was some hardcore leftie NPR/PBS [!!!!] screening in L.A. and some guy stands up and goes, ‘Thank you for making the first pro-legalization movie.’ Then the other night, Commissioner Safir came to a screening and said he thought it was the most accurate representation of law enforcement he’d seen in a long time. And I have, you know, stoner friends who are going, like, ‘Dude, yeah, great . . . ‘”

Since the “hip” movie-makers of today would never get caught dead making “propaganda” films like “Battle of Algiers” or “Land and Freedom”, I suppose that we can be grateful for what amounts to a positive image of Che Guevara. The portrait that emerges from Soderbergh’s epic is that of a heroic, deeply idealistic and self-sacrificing revolutionary. One scene stands out. As the guerrilla army is headed toward Havana in 1959 for the final assault on the old regime, Che (Benicio Del Toro) spots a group of combatants in a fancy Chrysler convertible. He speeds ahead in his jeep and after forcing them to the side of the road, orders them to return the car to its owner, even if he was a Batista official. The revolution must operate on different principles than the old regime, including the need to avoid personal gain.

Earlier in the movie, Che has tracked down a couple of men who were in his guerrilla column briefly but who after leaving began demanding money from peasants in the name of the revolution. One of the men even raped one of their daughters. Once the two were apprehended, Che had them executed. This scene conveys Che Guevara’s determination to uphold the reputation of the movement, but it also serves to illustrate a kind of ruthlessness that is essential to Soderbergh’s portrait. In another scene, he invites any of the men or women under his command to step forward if they are tired of fighting and wish to return home. As they do, he begins denouncing them as “cowards” and “faggots”. In my view, this scene was essential for preserving Soderbergh’s reputation as somebody too cool for Che Guevara hero worship. Whether or not Che Guevara ever behaved this way or used such homophobic language is another story altogether.

By far the most dramatic scene in part one of “Che” is a battle scene set in Santa Clara, the last city that had to be taken before the final assault on Havana. This is an exciting firefight involving an attack on an armored train and other heavily fortified strongholds of Batista’s troops. One of these is a church that has a clear firing line across the city. Since it is too dangerous to make a direct assault on the church, the guerrillas break through the walls of five houses adjacent to the church. As each wall gives way to a sledge hammer, the tension mounts. As much as I enjoyed this scene, I couldn’t help but wondering if Soderbergh saw much difference between choreographing this action and that of breaking into the vault of a Las Vegas hotel in one of the Oceans 11 series.

Although most of the film is devoted to the technical issues of training guerrillas and preparing for battle, concerns that are uppermost in the minds of Soderbergh and screenwriter Peter Buchman (his previous credits are “Eragon”, a children’s movie about dragons, and “Jurassic Park III” for what that’s worth), there are references to politics scattered throughout the movie. In flash-forward’s, we see Che giving rousing anti-imperialist speeches to the U.N. that will generally not be heard at your local Cineplex’s.

You also hear differences of opinion between Che and Fidel (played rather effectively by Demián Bichir in what is admittedly a secondary role) over the usefulness of urban-based mass action. Fidel is for it, Che is dubious. Clearly, Soderbergh is ill-equipped to dig too deep into the political questions revolving around this debate since it would take much more of an engagement with the Cuban revolutionary process. Julia E. Sweig’s “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground” makes a rather convincing case that without the trade unions and student movement, the guerrillas would not have succeeded. A movie that deals with the Cuban revolution in all its facets has yet to be made and when it is made, I doubt that any Hollywood film-maker would be up to the task.

Even when “Che” pays lip-service to the idea of mass action, the real message is that an armed struggle by a determined minority is what transformed Cuba. In one of the cities that has fallen to the guerrillas, a citizen approaches Che to thank him for being delivered from the Batista tyranny. Che chides him by saying that it was the people who were responsible, not the guerrillas. Since the movie does not show a single scene of people being mobilized, except for briefly putting up barricades in the Santa Clara fighting, the politically unsophisticated audience member would have no idea what Che was talking about. Despite the words he puts in his character’s mouths, Soderbergh’s revolution was more Blanquist than Marxist.

Since part one was based on “Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War”, I decided to take a quick look at some of the chapters that are online at the Marxists Internet Archives as a kind of reality check. This is a book that I have not read before, but am indirectly familiar with its contents since it provides much of the substance of Jon Lee Anderson’s biography.

While much of it jibes with the portrait of Che in Soderbergh’s movie, there are passages that reveal Che to be a much more complex figure. Missing from the movie is any sense of the vulnerability expressed in “Alegría De Pío”, chapter 3 of part one of the Reminiscences. Che writes:

This might have been the first time I was faced, literally, with the dilemma of choosing between my devotion to medicine and my duty as a revolutionary soldier. There, at my feet, was a backpack full of medicine and a box of ammunition. They were too heavy to carry both. I picked up the ammunition, leaving the medicine, and started to cross the clearing, heading for the cane field. I remember Faustino Pérez, on his knees in the bushes, fi ring his submachine gun. Near me, a compañero named [Emilio] Albentosa was walking toward the cane field. A burst of gunfire hit us both. I felt a sharp blow to my chest and a wound in my neck; I thought for certain I was dead. Albentosa, vomiting blood and bleeding profusely from a deep wound made by a .45-caliber bullet, screamed something like, “They’ve killed me,” and began to fire his rife although there was no one there. Flat on the ground, I said to Faustino, “I’m fucked,” and Faustino, still shooting, looked at me and told me it was nothing, but I saw in his eyes he considered me as good as dead. Still on the ground, I fired a shot toward the woods, on an impulse like that of my wounded companion. I immediately began to think about the best way to die, since in that minute all seemed lost. I remembered an old Jack London story in which the hero, aware that he is about to freeze to death in Alaskan ice, leans against a tree and prepares to die with dignity. That was the only thing that came to my mind. Someone, on his knees, shouted that we should surrender, and I heard a voice – later I found out it belonged to Camilo Cienfuegos – shouting, “No one surrenders here!” followed by a swear word. [José] Ponce approached me, agitated and breathing hard. He showed me a bullet wound that appeared to have pierced his lungs. He told me he was wounded and I replied, indifferently, that I was as well. Then Ponce, along with other unhurt compañeros, crawled toward the cane field. For a moment I was alone, just lying there waiting to die. Almeida approached, urging me to go on, and despite the intense pain I dragged myself into the cane field. There I saw the great compañero  Raúl Suárez, whose thumb had been blown away by a bullet, being attended by Faustino Pérez, who was bandaging his hand. Then everything blurred – low- flying airplanes strafing the field, adding to the confusion – amid scenes that were at once Dantesque and grotesque, such as an overweight combatant trying to hide behind a single sugarcane stalk, or a man who kept yelling for silence in the din of gunfire, for no apparent reason.

About part two of “Che”, the less said the better. Like Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, it is pretty much two hours of fairly graphic suffering, all intended to resonate with the popular image of Che Guevara as martyr to the cause. I only sat through it because I felt obligated to review both parts of the movie. But all in all, part two did not have anything to say that wasn’t already said in the 1994 documentary “Ernesto Che Guevara, The Bolivian Diary” that is a nonstop nightmare of asthma attacks, betrayal, and futility.

Finally, I would recommend that you look at what the Cubans had to say about Soderbergh’s movie. On December 5^th 2008, Granma’s film critic Rolando Perez Betancourt advised his readers:

Among the films that most interest filmgoers at Havana’s New Latin American Cinema Festival is The Argentine and The Guerrilla, centered on the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the two films were scheduled to be premiered over the weekend. A first rapprochement to this over four-hour ambitious story allows us to speak about a respectful approach to such a legendary figure, without leaving out the controversies both in terms of the treatment of certain historical contents and its aesthetic connotations.

When we watch The Argentine and The Guerrilla, the first thing that comes to mind, especially with respect to the first one, is the kind of audience it will have, because, if movie goers overseas and less seasoned in Cuban history can find credibility and authenticity, both in the development of characters and in the performance of actors, someone who has grown up in these lands detects the false tone of some recreations, or the histrionic imitation trying to make up for a real complex character.

Allow me to cite two examples, among many: the image of late Cuban leader Camilo Cienfuegos. The actor has a startling resemblance with him but he is conceived in the script in such an oversimplified way that he seems to be a comedian from a fair. The Fidel Castro interpreted by Demian Bechir, whose work has been praised, depicts the gestures that became an iconographic collection of the first years of the Revolution, but don’t go beyond an exact replica; he lacks charisma and depth.

At this point of evolving aesthetics, in which very few people would think of demanding absolute fidelity between historical facts and their artistic transposition, the aforementioned aspect can’t stop being risky in a story that takes place on the most faithful tracks of realism. In its first part it displays an efficient style of documentary narration, in black and white, making reference to Che’s visit to the United Nations and the interview he gave a US journalist, all of which lends itself to set out, from the astuteness of his thinking, the ideological his convictions.

The first part, shot after the second one, has a linear structure made up by a series of historical facts –the journey of the Granma yacht, the battles in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the treatment given to traitors, the new forces joining the guerrillas, the battle of Santa Clara–, which is imposed as a mere graphic reconstruction of something already known. And between episodes of combat and historical characters that don’t convince due to their lack of depth on the script, the filmmakers barely approach the decisive factor in movies of this type: emotion.

The Argentine lacks dramatic writing, and not precisely because it avoids seeking the “exact” nature of facts, but rather because every now and then the director gives the impression of losing his way amid so much abundance of material and characters.

We must applaud Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro, the actor that efficiently manages to make the public get closer to a flesh and blood hero of high spiritual stature and for accepting the challenge of taking this story to the screen, taking into account that Che Guevara is one of the most loved and at the same time hated figures in the history of humankind, and there’s no need to underline the ideological and social differences of those both sides.

The purpose of the two artists has been, undoubtedly, to reflect a man that has become a legend without turning the story they’re telling into a myth. If we talk about results, I wouldn’t hesitate to affirm that in spite of its defects, these two films are more positive than negative in an international framework in which Che Guevara’s figure is the object of the most dissimilar manipulations.

We all know what the figure of Che Guevara has been in the hands of the Hollywood, which in no way should be interpreted as a consolation of what is now admissible (Soderbergh’s Che Guevara) compared to the garbage made before. Cuban cinematography will have to assume, at some point, its own challenge of telling these stories with their most authentic nuances and not exempt from controversy.

If in the first part of this long movie there’s a deficient artistic making, in the second, The Guerrilla, we can appreciate that Soderbergh has grown up as a storyteller, in command of a visual density of higher caliber. However, for those who have read Che’s diary and other documents about those days in Bolivia the same question comes to surface: why the producers preferred to highlight less important events over others that were more significant, or changed the names and attitudes of some of the guerrillas.

And, on this point, the critic stopped writing to knock on the door of the Center for Che Guevara Studies, an entity that since the beginning of Soderbergh’s project was in contact with the director and put in his hands the most varied documents and the historical advise he needed, both in terms of theory and facts. This was hard work that, according to the Center’ executives, never questioned the logical changes historical facts could have on the screen, but yes, seeing to it that their essence was not distorted.

Hence the Center -which helped to correct mistakes on the first drafts and threw light over several confused aspects-, has some reservations and dissatisfactions with respect to the finished work, among them -just to mention one- the lightweight treatment given to the character of Tania la guerrilla.

All these aspects should be taken into account at the time of watching Soderbergh’s Che Guevara on the Havana big screens.