Director Walter Selles stuck faithfully to Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado's book recounting their 1952 adventure traveling through thousands of miles of South America, much of their adventure taking them through magnificent wilderness and provincial small towns.
Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) was about a semester away from receiving his medical degree. His jovial companion was training in biochemistry. They set off on Granado's misnamed motorcycle, "The Mighty One." Unfortunately it wasn't and most of their journey was by many kinds of conveyances other than the wrecked bike left behind in Chile. Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) really loved that bike. Very sad.
The two, a sort of Cisco and Pancho act, had a lot of fun as the book shows and the film recreates. Cadging money and food and looking for willing girls, they pulled various scams including passing themselves off not only as MDs but also as respected and acknowledged leprosy specialists.
They encounter much poverty but also many spirited people who seem to need a healthy dose of some form of democracy. Guevara, who picks up the sobriquet "Che" in Chile, the name by which he is known to history and revered in Cuba, begins to demonstrate a nascent political consciousness. Watching people shape up for hopeful but very dangerous employment by the Anaconda Mining Co. folks and encountering a desperately poor communist couple shakes up the middle-class future revolutionary. As I watched those scenes, with pithy one-line expressions of concern coupled with outrage, a little voice inside me warned "Stand-by for a big speech."
Part of the duo's plan was to work at a leprosarium on the Amazon. Arriving there director Selles focuses closely on Che's taut face as he's told that patients dwell on one side of the wide river with the staff ensconced on the other. Never mind that while a doctor says that the patients being treated aren't contagious, the actual pre-Dapsone therapeutic medical reality (especially in poor countries) was that such patients did pose a communicable risk if they were in extended contact with non-infected persons.
More than a few observers and authors have noted that Che, or the memory of Che since he's conveniently dead and no possible challenge to Castro, is Cuba's secular approximation of Christ. Here at the leprosarium the young almost-MD treats patients with a compassion and skill that suggests he might be the Healer who can walk on water (later it's proved that, at the least, this seriously compromised asthmatic can swim the Amazon).
As the time to leave the leprosarium arrives, the grateful nuns and staff throw a birthday bash for their now universally respected young genius. Even the nuns, originally somewhat hidebound by Mother Superior's rules, dance. Dancing nuns at a leprosarium! Well I never.
At the bash Che delivers a quiet but impassioned speech proclaiming that all who live in Latin America from Mexico to Patagonia are of one race with one destiny. Arrant nonsense and now Che, soon to be the Dull, Turgid Dogmatist first flies his colors unequivocally. His statement reflects all he HASN'T learned in his travels.
"The Motorcycle Diaries," divorced of politics and its mission of rewarding the living faithful and recruiting new cultists, is well-acted (only the two lead characters really matter but the rest of the cast is good). It's a fine road movie, largely genuinely funny. Scenery is breath-taking. But did I mention politics?
Che was a star of the American rebellious, left wing, young in the sixties who couldn't or wouldn't realize that whatever the defects of Batista, Castro wasn't then and isn't now an improvement. Yes, American policy towards Cuba was stupid - still is really - but the reality is that the charming, funny, caring physician portrayed here was the trusted and ruthless aide to Castro in installing a regime where individual rights, the rule of law and due process were violently swept into that country's dustbin.
An end title reports that Che's death in Bolivia was at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. Whatever that organization's half-baked involvement was, the fact not reported in the movie is that Che was the designated exporter of the Cuban Revolution, a product most Latin Americans never wanted. Che didn't understand that.
Stalin famously remarked that with a live man there are problems and with a dead one none. Che as the iconographic representation of Castro's revolution continues to perform yeoman post-mortem service for his leader. Some young people still have his visage tattooed on their bodies and Che t-shirts are available everywhere. Perhaps in the fullness of time Che might have realized how wrongheaded and evil the Castro regime had become. Probably not-he had come to enjoy power.
As a movie "The Motorcycle Diaries" is quite attractive. As a political polemic it avoids stridency for a while before descending into the world of The Message. Old unreconstructed Lefties will love it and the great historically naive young may well believe that Che was if not Christ at least a good apostle for social justice. He wasn't.
In her forward to the new English edition of "The Motorcycle Diaries" Che's daughter, who lives in Cuba, remarks that rereading the book made her fall in love with her father as a boy. I can understand that. Book and movie capture a certain charm and the promise of a caring doctor. But Che's life went on after his peregrination. His postponed adulthood made him the fanatical messenger of revolution. Nothing to love about that.
7/10
Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) was about a semester away from receiving his medical degree. His jovial companion was training in biochemistry. They set off on Granado's misnamed motorcycle, "The Mighty One." Unfortunately it wasn't and most of their journey was by many kinds of conveyances other than the wrecked bike left behind in Chile. Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) really loved that bike. Very sad.
The two, a sort of Cisco and Pancho act, had a lot of fun as the book shows and the film recreates. Cadging money and food and looking for willing girls, they pulled various scams including passing themselves off not only as MDs but also as respected and acknowledged leprosy specialists.
They encounter much poverty but also many spirited people who seem to need a healthy dose of some form of democracy. Guevara, who picks up the sobriquet "Che" in Chile, the name by which he is known to history and revered in Cuba, begins to demonstrate a nascent political consciousness. Watching people shape up for hopeful but very dangerous employment by the Anaconda Mining Co. folks and encountering a desperately poor communist couple shakes up the middle-class future revolutionary. As I watched those scenes, with pithy one-line expressions of concern coupled with outrage, a little voice inside me warned "Stand-by for a big speech."
Part of the duo's plan was to work at a leprosarium on the Amazon. Arriving there director Selles focuses closely on Che's taut face as he's told that patients dwell on one side of the wide river with the staff ensconced on the other. Never mind that while a doctor says that the patients being treated aren't contagious, the actual pre-Dapsone therapeutic medical reality (especially in poor countries) was that such patients did pose a communicable risk if they were in extended contact with non-infected persons.
More than a few observers and authors have noted that Che, or the memory of Che since he's conveniently dead and no possible challenge to Castro, is Cuba's secular approximation of Christ. Here at the leprosarium the young almost-MD treats patients with a compassion and skill that suggests he might be the Healer who can walk on water (later it's proved that, at the least, this seriously compromised asthmatic can swim the Amazon).
As the time to leave the leprosarium arrives, the grateful nuns and staff throw a birthday bash for their now universally respected young genius. Even the nuns, originally somewhat hidebound by Mother Superior's rules, dance. Dancing nuns at a leprosarium! Well I never.
At the bash Che delivers a quiet but impassioned speech proclaiming that all who live in Latin America from Mexico to Patagonia are of one race with one destiny. Arrant nonsense and now Che, soon to be the Dull, Turgid Dogmatist first flies his colors unequivocally. His statement reflects all he HASN'T learned in his travels.
"The Motorcycle Diaries," divorced of politics and its mission of rewarding the living faithful and recruiting new cultists, is well-acted (only the two lead characters really matter but the rest of the cast is good). It's a fine road movie, largely genuinely funny. Scenery is breath-taking. But did I mention politics?
Che was a star of the American rebellious, left wing, young in the sixties who couldn't or wouldn't realize that whatever the defects of Batista, Castro wasn't then and isn't now an improvement. Yes, American policy towards Cuba was stupid - still is really - but the reality is that the charming, funny, caring physician portrayed here was the trusted and ruthless aide to Castro in installing a regime where individual rights, the rule of law and due process were violently swept into that country's dustbin.
An end title reports that Che's death in Bolivia was at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. Whatever that organization's half-baked involvement was, the fact not reported in the movie is that Che was the designated exporter of the Cuban Revolution, a product most Latin Americans never wanted. Che didn't understand that.
Stalin famously remarked that with a live man there are problems and with a dead one none. Che as the iconographic representation of Castro's revolution continues to perform yeoman post-mortem service for his leader. Some young people still have his visage tattooed on their bodies and Che t-shirts are available everywhere. Perhaps in the fullness of time Che might have realized how wrongheaded and evil the Castro regime had become. Probably not-he had come to enjoy power.
As a movie "The Motorcycle Diaries" is quite attractive. As a political polemic it avoids stridency for a while before descending into the world of The Message. Old unreconstructed Lefties will love it and the great historically naive young may well believe that Che was if not Christ at least a good apostle for social justice. He wasn't.
In her forward to the new English edition of "The Motorcycle Diaries" Che's daughter, who lives in Cuba, remarks that rereading the book made her fall in love with her father as a boy. I can understand that. Book and movie capture a certain charm and the promise of a caring doctor. But Che's life went on after his peregrination. His postponed adulthood made him the fanatical messenger of revolution. Nothing to love about that.
7/10