Demob Happy

Cuba libra

8/10

I was going to start this post with a summary put down of biopics and it’s many crimes against good filmmaking. From pointless impersonation (’Ali’), to line-towing, officially sanctioned dross (’Ray’), to films of such massive pretension that you suspect the filmmaker to be covertly, deliberately assassinating the credibility of its subject (Oliver Stone’s ‘The Doors’): the genre is an easy and often well-struck target. However, on doing some quick googling research, I couldn’t find enough films to justify the argument, and couldn’t help but feel I would be joining a critical bandwagon in taking this well-aired stance. In fact, there have been many biopics I’ve enjoyed in recent years, and for every Oscar-baiting star vehicle dressed up as Really Serious Drama (think Nicole Kidman’s noble sacrifice in wearing a prosthetic nose - gasp! - in The Hours), there have been thrilling and imaginative films to outnumber them. From Scorcese’s vertiginous ‘The Aviator’ (”It’s the way of the future, It’s the way of the future”) and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s many-faced ‘Capote’, to the knowingly deranged characateur of Edith Piaf in ‘La Vie En Rose’, biopics are emerging as subtler and more impressionistic than we have been conditioned to expect. Even conventional Hollywood fare like ‘Walk the Line’ was much better than it looked on paper.

Benicio Del Toro’s performance in the first part of Steven Soderberg’s epic double-whammy ‘Che’ (aka Ernesto “Che” Guevara) is striking for its very lack of characateur and ostentation. Here is an actor who seems to really inhabit the eponymous role, so naturalistic is the performance, so that we don’t spend the duration of the movie marvelling at a first-class impersonation, but rather accept his innate Che-ness and get on with watching the film. Based loosely on Che’s posthumously published ‘Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War’, ‘Che’ has no big actorly set pieces, and rarely so much as a raised voice. Del Toro oozes an innate charisma, radiating an authority and charm that apparently made him the revolutionary poster-boy he remains today.

Much has been made of the fragmented, non-linearity of Soderberg’s narrative, but this is not a wilfully fragmented Alejandro González Iñárritu film, and if you struggled to follow the minor jumbling of time here then your reading age probably corresponds with your shoe size. Rather the film dwells on a small number of passages in Che’s life, creating an atmospheric and tangible portrait of the man without feeling the need to spell everything out for the viewer. It gets the balance right between impressionistic distance and providing a historical framework to the narrative. The lack of histrionics is refreshing, as well as the film’s humour and humility: despite the film’s subject manner there is little chest-beating over-earnestness. Despite his ubiquity - he appears in nearly every scene - there is no grunting one-man-takes-on-allcomers nonsense (i.e., it’s not Braveheart).

Yet there is something about Soderberg’s ‘Che’, following in the footsteps of ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, that celebrates the ideals of the Latin American revolutionary spirit to the point of nostalgia. Compared to the nihilistic age of jihadist terror that we are constantly told we live in, the ethics of the Cuban Revolution seem positively noble. Whether a certain gloss has been applied to ‘Che’ I am not really equipped to argue, but the film enforces, rather than debunks, the Guevara myth: adding fleshy gravitas to the iconic image gracing t-shirts and bedroom walls the world over. For all its naturalism, the backslapping bonhomie and handsome bearded revolutionary chic hardly shatter the romantic notion of Guevara. Biopics have never really succeeded in getting under the skin of their subjects - after all how can we really trust what we see in the cinema - but ‘Che’, like the best films in any genre, succeeds through a combination of great acting and a pertinent use of film style. My favourite Soderberg film since ‘Traffic’, I await Part Two with anticipation.