A successful filmmaker, a gifted actor and a dedicated producer commit to bringing the tale of a storied, polarizing figure to the big screen.
So far, so good.
But then Steven Soderbergh, Benicio Del Toro and Laura Bickford agreed that in order to do justice to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban revolution, they had to do the movie in two parts . . . and in Spanish.
“We had this massive script, and it was still kind of unwieldy,” recalls director Soderbergh on the phone. “So I said we should take our cue from nature. Whenever a cell gets too large, it divides in order to survive.”
And so, “Che” became a two-part epic.
Since first coming into popular-culture consciousness with his industry-altering indie “sex, lies, and videotape” in 1989, Soderbergh has become known for his ability to create a macro/ micro, studio/art-house zone that keeps him engaged.
For every breezy “Ocean’s” installment starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, there is something challenging like “The Good German,” also starring Clooney.
More than seven years after embarking on the biopic of the Argentina-born doctor turned guerrilla-war philospher, Soderbergh premiered “Che” at the Cannes Film Festival last May to kudos, but also brickbats.
Del Toro won the acting award at Cannes for his single-minded performance as the committed revolutionary.
The charged reception came as no surprise. It is an elegant, painstaking, but also appreciative accounting of Che that focuses, especially in Part Two, on the intricacies of guerrilla warfare.
“Che: Part One” and “Part Two” open at the Mayan today in what is being called “The Roadshow Version.” This means the theater will screen the four-hour-plus opus with a 15-minute intermission. (Tickets are $16; seniors and matinees, $12 for the special engagement).
“Part One” covers the Cuban Revolution: from the time Guevara is introduced to Fidel Castro at a gathering of Cuban exiles in Mexico City in 1956 up until Che’s victorious advance toward Havana in 1959.
Soderbergh intercuts Che’s celebrity-style visit to New York City in 1964 (shot in sumptuous black- and-white) with scenes of Che and his column of guerrillas fighting and proseletizing in the Cuban countryside when victory was hardly assured.
“Part One” is as visually elegant as “Part Two” is doggedly grim. There is a repetitiveness to Che’s time in Bolivia. Scenes of military campaigns, deftly woven with vibrant re-creations of Che’s visit to New York and his address to the U.N. in the first installment, make up nearly the whole of “Part Two.”
Soderbergh and Del Toro insist on capturing the tireless-tiresome work of organizing a revolution.
An asthmatic Che wheezes his way through undergrowth and bush. He inspires and castigates his soldiers. He meets peasants, tries to convince them of the cause, castigates … well, you get the picture. It is relentless, intentionally so.
“I was trying to do two things at once that might seem at cross purposes, but aren’t. I wanted to simplify the storytelling, (yet) at the same time make it very detailed,” he says.
“We were trying to put across how humanly hard it was to do what they did. It requires incredible human and mental stamina,” says Soderbergh.
Soderbergh recounts a story of Del Toro taking the film to Havana. There a man who served with Che pulled the actor aside and told him that he’d nailed his old comrade — and furthermore, that no Cuban could have made the film.
“He wasn’t saying a Cuban filmmaker didn’t have the skill to make it,” Soderbergh believes. “He was saying that it would have been too loaded a story for an indigenous filmmaker to have been clinical about.”
Clinical is an interesting word choice. Che applied a chilly rigor to revolutionary struggle. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described him as “the most complete human being of our age,” an intellectual who implemented his understanding of class struggle in a whole- minded fashion.
“This guy just didn’t have an ‘off’ switch,” Soderbergh says. “There’s no moment in which he’s not behaving according to a certain revolutionary code.”
At times, Soderbergh’s clinical approach to his subject — his truth is in the details — seems like an evasion.
And there are those who believe Soderbergh has created too sympathetic a portrait.
The director mentions one of the more volatile screenings. It took place in Miami.
“If you’re dealing with someone whose relative might have been one of those executed during that time in La Cambana (prison), there’s going to be no real way to assuage and appease them and convince them that the movie isn’t a commercial for him.”
In 1967, Che was executed in Bolivia. He was 39. It was not a glorious end.
Soderbergh provides a haunting, resonant shot that seems to offer a rebuttal to critics and a cautionary note to T-shirt-sporting hipsters.
The camera stays trained on the fallen guerrilla’s body as it’s choppered out of the jungle.
A blanket covers that iconic face, captured by Alberto Korda seven years earlier at a memorial service for victims of a munitions-ship explosion.
A rope is tied around Che’s neck to keep the gray woolen coverlet in place. The end.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com. Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
