Film Review: The Argentine (Che: Part One)
Article published: Friday, February 13th 2009
The Argentine is the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s sprawling biopic of Che Guevara. It is a flawed film, evidently a labour of love that on paper couldn’t be taken seriously yet in practice somehow keeps the audiences attention. Extensively researched and shown at Cannes in its full 268 minutes, it is a biopic that makes no attempt to interrogate or question its subject matter – unlike the quietly beautiful The Motorcycle Diaries (2004).
Instead the story focuses solely on Che’s public life; a doctor valued by a band of guerrillas for his skills who gives up being the medic at the first opportunity to becoming an asthmatic fighter who then spends two hours wheezing from battle to battle, pausing only to drop in on various villages as some sort of messianic manifestation of beardy Marxist goodness.
The biographical action sequences chart the course of the Cuban revolution, or more specifically where Guevara was and who he was shooting on certain dates. This is interspersed with docudrama-esque black and white footage of Guevara addressing the United Nations (UN) in 1964.
Soderbergh has claimed the film is not an exercise in hero-worship, but a document of how Guevara lived as a human being.
In fact, it manages to do neither, offering little substance to Guevara’s life, saying nothing new and barely giving a sense of who he is to the audience. The scenes in New York depict an overconfident guerrilla looking tremendously out of place in his fatigues at champagne receptions, or subjected to critical speeches at the UN, but fail to question the man’s motivation, sincerity or character. Everything, from the speeches to the news interviews, is just rhetoric; there’s never the slightest attempt to explore anything, least of all if Guevera ever meant any of the things he did or said.
Having said that Benecio del Toros performance is perfect, other than the fact he looks his 41 years when playing Guevara in his twenties and thirties. In fact, every performance is perfect, or near enough (Demin Bichir in particular manages to uncannily occupy Fidel Castro).
The only exception is Catalina Sandino Moreno as Che’s eventual wife, who seems happy to step around the occasional mortar round or bullet with a pretty smile on her face.
The otherwise brilliant acting partly saves the film from becoming a left of liberal student’s equivalent of a particularly unsubtle John Wayne movie, although in a sense this is its charm; it’s an unthinking production, not really propaganda but not really anything else.
In an age when popular films are becoming increasingly cerebral, with varying degrees of success, The Argentine is refreshingly unpretentious. This superficial retelling of a modern myth is a bizarre, meandering yet engaging film.
by Ragnor Ironpants
Che: Part 2 is released later this month.
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