You’ve got the poster, now see the movie. Long before he became an icon in cannabis-clouded bedsits, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was a revolutionary. No really. An unknown Argentine doctor with an impossibly romantic zeal for social justice, the young Che would abandon his profession to fight for the emancipation of the impoverished and downtrodden all over the planet. His first port of call was the Caribbean, where, in 1956, he and Fidel Castro set sail in a rusty tub with a mere handful of recruits. Their big crazy idea was to invade Cuba and overthrow the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista. Sure enough, just over two years later, this guerrilla campaign would make it to Havana as the first successful socialist revolution in the Americas.
The first instalment of Steven Soderbergh’s wildly ambitious biopic takes us this far into Che history. A vehicle fashioned around its consistently excellent star, Benicio del Toro, the slight hum you hear throughout isn’t just artillery in the distance, it’s Oscar buzz. That’s not to say that Che: Part One is in any way cynical or obvious. If awards were Mr. Soderbergh’s primary purpose; he would hardly have delivered a four-hour plus epic divided into two discrete units. (Che: Part Two will be with us in February.)
But what is he up to? It can be difficult to tell. The director casts a characteristically cold eye on his subject. There is little sense of socialist fervour or historical grandiloquence about the project. This is, rather, a curiously un-dramatic treatment in which we are more likely to see our hero wheezing from an extended asthma attack than marching stoically, wind blowing through his hair, across Sierra Maestra.
Normal functions like narrative and character development are, instead, de-prioritised in favour of the daily grind of guerrilla life on a hostile terrain. For Mr. Soderbergh, the drama is in the details, the chaos, the raggle-taggle nature of his improvised army.
This eccentric, aloof approach shouldn’t work, but it does. Small things and practicalities – treating the wounded with no medical supplies, setting up camp on swampland – coalesce into a brilliantly tactile experience, not dissimilar to the remarkable overture of There Will Be Blood.
Somewhere between Mr. Del Toro’s simmering performance and the filmmaker’s chilly academic sensibility, we find a movie that’s worth fighting for.