Has any filmmaker in the history of cinema carved out a more radically eclectic career than Steven Soderbergh? It’s not merely the way that he bounces back and forth between big-budget extravaganzas like the Ocean’s Numeral series and such tiny, oddball experiments as Bubble and Schizopolis. No, it’s also the nearly masochistic eagerness with which he rushes to embrace every imaginable challenge. Monochrome homage to wartime Hollywood noir? Sure. Remake a confounding classic by Russian genius Andrei Tarkovsky? Don’t see a problem there. Film within a film within whatever the hell Full Frontal was? Hey, you know, why not? Even as we speak, he’s in preproduction on a 3-D musical about Cleopatra starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and scored by Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard. (I am not making this up.) So it’s no big surprise to see the words “a film by Steven Soderbergh” attached to a four-hour, two-part, almost sadistically punishing Che Guevara biopic. Because, really, who else would even dare?

Details

Che

Benicio Del Toro, Rodrigo Santoro, Catalina Sandino Moreno.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Rated R.

Part 1 opens Friday; Part 2 opens March 27.

Beyond the Weekly

IMDb: Che

Rotten Tomatoes: Che

Which isn’t necessarily to commend such daring, of course. Still, you have to give Soderbergh—as well as Benicio Del Toro, who initiated the project and plays the title role—plenty of bonus points for ambition. Che is essentially two separate films, and its two halves will be screening separately in Vegas, this first beginning this Friday, and the second beginning March 27. Part 1 (also known as The Argentine), shot in a glossy, inviting wide-screen format, depicts the successful Cuban Revolution of the late 1950s, intercutting Guevara’s struggle to overthrow Batista with his 1964 trip to New York City, where he addressed the United Nations. The second film, subtitled Guerrilla, leaps ahead to Guevara’s ill-fated adventure in Bolivia, which Soderbergh depicts visually via a shaky handheld-camera style and a more claustrophobic aspect ratio. Most biopics have a familiar rise-and-fall trajectory, but rarely have the subject’s ascent and decline been cordoned off from each other to this lunatic degree, with everything in between (save for the brief NYC trip) utterly ignored.

As movies with no compelling reason to exist go, Che is really quite good. The shift from freewheeling, wide-screen Cuban triumph to flat, plodding Bolivian nightmare packs the intended dialectical punch, and you couldn’t ask for a less flashy, more committed portrait of Guevara—so intent is Del Toro on eschewing mythology that Guevara often threatens to recede into the background of his own movie. The film is scrupulously intelligent, admirably evenhanded (though some have complained that Guevara’s despotic side gets overlooked) and only very faintly dull given its extreme length. It’s just ... why? Usually there’s some glimmer of vitality to be found in a project like this, even if it’s only the star’s desperation to win approval and/or an Oscar. Here, it feels more as if Soderbergh drew the subject “Che Guevara” out of a hat and then set about finding the most interesting approach he could think of. Never for a moment do you get the sense that he’s invested in the movie as anything more than a technical exercise.

Given its grueling attention to the grimy, exhausting details of overthrowing a government using a ragtag volunteer army, the film’s champions have argued that Che is ultimately a film about “process,” and thus its failings in traditional areas like character and narrative should be excused or disregarded. But while we certainly get acquainted with the nuts and bolts of armed insurrection over these four hours, that sort of encyclopedic cataloging in no way dovetails with the grandiose rise/fall structure. (Guevara’s strategy is essentially the same in both campaigns; it’s just that the Bolivians, unlike the Cubans, refuse to cooperate.) At a post-screening Q&A I attended, Soderbergh confessed that he hadn’t known at the outset what drew him to Guevara, but that he ultimately came to realize that for him the film is fundamentally about engagement—an almost comical irony, since he couldn’t possibly seem more disengaged.