Walter Salles’s road film is warm and affecting, with Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna convincing as travelling companions. Its affection for young Guevara sometimes discourages harder questions.
Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries is a good, affecting road film that is sometimes too eager to approve of its famous passenger. It follows the young Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado through South America, where encounters with poverty begin to change Ernesto’s outlook. Salles gives the pair time to enjoy one another’s company before asking us to consider what the journey means. That patience is welcome, although the film becomes noticeably more cautious when there are difficult questions to ask about its subject.
Gael García Bernal makes Ernesto’s seriousness appealing without turning every moment into an announcement about the man he will become. His performance is watchful and unshowy, and it leaves room for Rodrigo de la Serna’s Alberto Granado to matter. De la Serna gives the companionship enough ease that we believe these men would choose to spend so much time together. Neither actor strains to make the friendship important. The pleasure of being in one another’s company is there before the film starts asking them to learn from the people they meet.
Éric Gautier’s cinematography lets us enjoy the distance covered and the changing surroundings, which helps the travel hold our interest without a constant supply of incidents. Carlos Conti’s production design keeps the places they visit from feeling like exhibits assembled for a biographical lesson. We can look past Ernesto and Alberto and imagine people continuing their lives after the travellers have gone. The handsome images do carry a risk, though: hardship can become something pleasant to contemplate from a comfortable seat.
Daniel Rezende’s editing allows the encounters to settle instead of pushing us straight towards their consequences for Ernesto. At 126 minutes, the film has room for that approach, but some stretches linger after the point has registered. Gustavo Santaolalla’s music is well suited to Salles’s gentleness, giving the reflective passages feeling without making them sound like declarations. It helps sustain interest when the pace slackens, although music cannot make each new stage of the young man’s education equally revealing.
We were moved by Ernesto’s growing attention to the poverty around him. García Bernal makes that concern feel newly discovered, without the self-satisfaction of someone who arrived knowing all the answers. Jose Rivera’s screenplay understands the discomfort of finding that other people’s lives are harder than one’s own, but it is reluctant to examine the conclusions Ernesto draws. The film puts considerable faith in his decency. There are moments when another encounter tells us little more than that he cares, and we have already understood that.
A road film need not provide a political education, and Salles is right to resist turning the journey into a series of lectures. But choosing Guevara gives these experiences a historical importance that the writing does not always earn. The people the companions meet occasionally seem to have been included chiefly to improve Ernesto, when their own lives invite attention. That limits a film whose interest in other people is otherwise so persuasive. Watch it for the friendship; an argument about Guevara will still be waiting afterwards.
