Jungles & Jungles & Jungles

I was lucky enough to see Steven Soderbergh's Che in its "Roadshow" iteration last night, which was a little surprising. The "Roadshow" screenings consist of both halves of the film (which are separate narratives, if pretty similar in tone) shown back-to-back with an intermission; it's a total of 4 1/2 hours for the whole shebang. I say it was surprising because outside of the annual film fest, nothing cool in cinema ever happens here in Philly. The Ritz chickened out on showing David Lynch's 3-hour Inland Empire a year or two ago, and it's generally moved toward extra-middlebrow fare after being bought up by Landmark Theatres.

A four-and-a-half hour film viewing experience might seem like a particularly purposeful act of masochism, especially when that film comes with the buzz that Che does - it's resolutely un-entertaining and detail-focused, with the big action set-pieces interrupted by revolutionary-theorizing voice-overs. (Although it would have been quite the different film, you can picture what one-time director - and voiceover obsessive - Terrence Malick might have done with this movie.) The long slog, however, gives the film its full hypnotizing power; you feel yourself drifting away a little at the beginning, but by the second part you've acclimated to the meticulous rhythms of the movie and you lose your desire for (indeed, expectation of) the big payoff.

So - where does the virtue lie in making a film this long, with this little "human interest"? The real miracle of Che is its dismantling of the endlessly-noted irony of Guevara's posthumous career: that a man who preached subsuming yourself into a revolutionary cause has become far more widely loved and glorified than the cause itself. Soderbergh's film doesn't have much to say about the practicality of Che's politics or the moral character of his operating methods. It endorses his view of the Latin American dictators as brutish oligarchs, but it doesn't leave you with any certainty that Che's government is going to be any better (Castro plays a big part in the first movie, and his mercurial jitteriness leaves you uneasy every time he's onscreen.)

Soderbergh's achievement, then, isn't ideological on a macro level, but it recues the practical dignity of Che's achievement from the relentless iconography that he's been made subject to. In particular, Benicio del Toro's amazing performance gives us the flip-side to Gael Garcia Bernal's in the Motorcycle Diaries; Bernal gave us the utopian dreamer and the extraordinary empathizer, while del Toro restores the relentless focus on unlocking the means to a revolutionary end. Apart from the often-stunning visuals - Soderbergh's work here is superlative - the closest Che comes to uttering anything remotely poetic is in the second half, when Che tells a young guerilla that the only way to win is to become "human waste." This is the film's vision, too, and it's a testament to the completeness of the director's and del Toro's vision that this doesn't make Che any less extraordinary; it just makes him that much closer to ourselves.