Soderbergh’s first half of his Guevara film is about how a revolution is run: marches, supply, discipline, argument. Del Toro is watchful and commanding, the method is bracing, and the man himself stays just out of reach.
Steven Soderbergh’s account of the Cuban revolution runs a little over four hours and arrives as two films. This is the first, and it stops before Havana. It opens with Ernesto Guevara, an Argentine doctor, at a table in Mexico with Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir), follows him into the Sierra Maestra, and ends in the streets of Santa Clara. Cut against that is a second strand, in black and white: Guevara in New York in 1964, being interviewed and addressing the United Nations. Peter Buchman’s screenplay is not much interested in what made the man. It is interested in how the war was fought, day by day, and that is the whole film.
Benicio del Toro, who also produced, plays Guevara from the outside. We never see a man deciding to become a revolutionary; we see one who has already decided, wheezing through an asthma attack on a climb, teaching a fighter to read, treating the wounded when the shooting stops. His voice barely rises in 134 minutes. Guevara is in nearly every scene and we learn almost nothing about what he wants for himself, and the performance makes that feel like discipline rather than a gap. There is one scene with a horse that will not go where it is told, and for a few seconds Del Toro’s face does something it does nowhere else.
Soderbergh shot it himself, and the two strands look nothing alike. The Sierra is in colour and wide, green and wet, with the camera at eye level, walking when the column walks and stopping when it stops. New York is grainy black and white, handheld, framed like the television of the period, so that we are watching a public face being asked what it thinks. Antxón Gómez’s camps are a few hammocks, a stove and a radio, and they look as if they could be gone in an hour. Bina Daigeler’s fatigues get dirtier and better fitted as the months pass; you can tell how long a man has been up the mountain by his trousers. Alberto Iglesias’s score is spare and often absent. The loudest thing in the film is rain.
Pablo Zumárraga cuts between the two so that a question put in New York is answered by something done in the hills, or is not answered, and the film lets the gap stand. The fighting comes late, and it is the best stretch. Santa Clara is taken from rooftops and through doorways, a block at a time, the camera down among the men doing the firing, and it is the one place where the film’s patience turns into excitement. We were properly gripped, and a little surprised to be, after an hour and a half of marching.
The cost of the method is that for long stretches the film asks us to be interested rather than moved, and we were interested, and we noticed the difference. Bichir’s Castro is good and sly and does most of the talking. The men around Guevara are another matter. Santiago Cabrera’s Cienfuegos, Vladimir Cruz’s Valdés and Edgar Ramírez’s Redondo are names attached to beards, and forty minutes in we could not have told you which was which. Julia Ormond’s Lisa Howard asks the questions we would ask and gets the answers a politician gives. The film knows what Guevara did after Havana and does not raise it. Part One ends before that argument can start.
Set against the ordinary biopic, this is close to a rebuke. There is no childhood, no wound to explain everything, no scene in which somebody tells Guevara what he means to history. Set against Soderbergh’s own record it is the most patient thing the director of Ocean’s Eleven has made, and for most of its length the patience is rewarded.
See it in a cinema if one will show it, where the length works on you and the Sierra is big enough to get lost in. At home it can turn into a documentary you admire from the sofa, which is not quite what it is. It runs 134 minutes and carries a 15. Do not expect to come out knowing the man. Expect to come out knowing how he ran a war, which is the rarer thing.
