Good god.The last film that I saw Benicio Del Toro in was Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), in the role of Dr. Gonzo, otherwise known as Oscar Zeta Acosta. Del Toro’s portrayal of the Chicano (Xicano?) activist, attorney, and poet was convincingly terrifying. In one scene we have Del Toro/Dr. Gonzo on a severe acid trip, raging in a bathtub filled with his own dirty water. In another scene, Dr. Gonzo and Johnny Depp’s Raoul Duke are high on ether in a casino bar which is located on a carnival-esque merry-go-round, which Dr. Gonzo just can’t get off. This scene is laborious and uproarious, with a heavy set Del Toro in white polyester bell bottoms hanging on to the rotating merry-go-round’s brass posts for his dear life. And in another scene he is suited, at his desk, back in his law offices in L.A., with the UFW (Viva la Raza!) flag on the wall behind him.
But my post here is about Steven Soderbergh’s 257-minute epic Che (2008), with Benicio Del Toro in the lead role as the revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, and with the script based upon Guevara’s own writings, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and The Bolivian Diary. I understand Che has been released in the USA in two parts, but Oscar, Sunny, and I got to see the entire film on Friday night. No previews, no opening or end credits, and each half of the film opened with something of a dynamic map of Cuba and the entire South American continent respectively. We were provided with published programs which included the film credits in their entirety, along with black and white photographic portraits of the costumed actors.
***[Possible] SPOILER ALERT***
It’s rather difficult to figure out how to write about a film so large in scope, so let me just say that whatever hope and uplift we have been left with at the end of the first half of the film (which takes place primarily between Cuba during the revolution, and Che’s 1964 New York visit in flash forward), with its awesome scene of a very articulate and commanding Che speaking at the podium at the U.N., this hope all slowly dissipates and then there are simply no traces of it left in the second half of the film, which takes place in Bolivia, where Che had failed to foment a revolutionary movement, and where he was ultimately executed in 1967. This second half is what’s lingering in my brain, precisely because its bleakness was so unrelenting and dreadful, with the film’s washed out color palette of the Bolivian landscape’s sharp, nettled textures underscoring this bleakness.
Here I think is where the unsexiness of the revolutionary’s life is being conveyed to us. Sunny will probably blog about this film’s second half having no narrative arc, as the script never really does culminate into some “meaningful” action. But I think that’s the point right there, that every step of the way, walking for long hours through the Bolivian jungle, practically starving and exhausted, their every effort to win the support of the peasants is thwarted. So it’s start and stop, start and stop all along the way, and this is the opposite of the first half of the film, in which it is constantly forward moving (this forward movement is accented by the flash forward sequences). It becomes frustrating to watch this second half, and that’s also very much the point. The guerrillas have no peasant support, no Communist Party support. Their position has been discovered, the CIA has trained the Bolivian military. The guerrillas are fucked.
And then Che, who has left behind his asthma medications, suffers a debilitating attack that adds another layer of frustration to this revolutionary movement that just won’t move. And in this extreme place of frustration, he loses it, turning in rage against his stubborn, starving, exhausted horse, pulling hard at its reins, slashing at it with his knife. So I spent the second half of the film just stressed out at the impossibility of continuing on. This is think speaks to the film’s effectiveness.
As for Benicio Del Toro, I’m not sure who I was seeing there on the movie screen. What I did not see was the Che of the ubiquitous T-shirt. I did see a character who grew from a fresh faced young man, into a grizzly old warrior, and right at the midpoint of these two things is his pinnacle: the U.N. I referred earlier to Del Toro’s role as Dr. Gonzo/Oscar Zeta Acosta as I consider how Del Toro either consumes his film roles or how they consume him. I’ve actually not seen a lot of movies with him in it. Before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I saw Sin City and vaguely recall him being a speaking disembodied head in Clive Owen’s car.
There. I don’t think I’ve said anything terribly helpful about Che, though I will say that I am quite glad to have seen a film which takes the revolutionary life so romanticized in American mainstream and counter cultures alike (ubiquitous Che shirts included here), underscores in its plot tedious military tactics, and in doing so, partially deflates the abstract idealism, celebrity, and sexiness out of it.
Brilliant blog entry. I appreciate the words.