Che Candidate for the Palme?

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (not to mention the folks at Cinematical) seem to think that the one true film has emerged:

The Cannes film festival now has a serious contender for the Palme d’or. Steven Soderbergh’s four-and-a-half hour epic Che, about the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role.

Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director’s flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured – the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first – and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che’s interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last.

The review gives more concrete reasons why the film is drawing such a mixed response, rather than the complaint that the film was just too long:

Despite its vast length, the movie covers very little of Guevara’s life. The early “Motorcycle Diaries” years (filmed by Walter Salles in 2004) are not dramatised, neither is the 1962 crisis, so we have no sense of whether Che could imagine endorsing a nuclear attack on the US from Cuban soil. The enigma of Che’s great parting with Fidel Castro (brilliantly impersonated here by Dami√†n Bechir) after the revolution is not illuminated, so we have no sense of whether the break was amicable, or what their friendship was actually like. His tangled love life is only glancingly touched on.

This is all about Che the warrior, the ideologue, the public man. It is a real action movie, and the second half in particular shows Che’s jungle warfare, virtually in real time, moment by agonising moment. Like the battle for Havana in 1957, the Bolivian jungle shootouts are thrilling, and you get a real, visceral sense of what it was like; the danger, the hardship, the fear.

It is such big, bold, ambitious film-making: and yet I was baffled that Soderbergh fought shy of so many important things in Che’s personal life. Of course, it could be that he avoided them to avoid vulgar speculation, and felt that the two spectacles of revolution incarnate were more compelling: a secular Passion play. Whatever the reason, Che is never boring and often gripping.