NYFF. Che.

"Che seems to me almost the polar opposite of agitprop," writes Glenn Kenny. "It flat out does not ask for the kind of emotional engagement that more conventional epic biopics do, and that's a good thing. To see people who position themselves as new voices, with new perspectives, in cinematic discourse, complain about this movie's lack of 'human drama' is mildly exasperating." Brace yourself, Glenn, here we go...

"If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, "Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che's public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the directior hasn't brought out of the material."

"If The Argentine recalls Preminger and Exodus, the second part of Che, called Guerilla and detailing the man's failed attempt to move the revolution to Bolivia, recalls Merrill's Marauders (1962), though certainly not Samuel Fuller's brute forcefulness as a filmmaker," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Che squandered the spirit of its subject at the onset, and for over four hours the film suffers most horribly from lacking the vitality and the intelligence of something so basic and so necessary both for the subject itself, but really for film as a medium."

"I gather that a good part of the film's appeal comes from its mostly steadfast refusal to glorify Guevara in the way of many a dorm room knick-knack, but Soderbergh already took his shot against the 'Che'erleaders in a pointed and hilarious image from The Limey (his last great movie) where Terence Stamp, cigarette dangling, silently contemplates a Che T-Shirt-sporting Luis Guzman." Keith Uhlich at UnderGroundOnline: "Soderbergh's thoughts on Guevara have been definitively stated in a singular instant, so to now work one's way through his dutiful re-creation of three specific moments in Che's life (the overthrow of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and Che's 1964 address of the United Nations make up the film's first part; the extended, and ultimately failed, 1967 campaign in Bolivia makes up the second) is a prolonged and wearying exercise in disinterest - impressive only in the removed abstract, as if watching a gaggle of mountaineers indifferently scale K2."

For Nick Schager, too, this is "a marathon portrait with all the insight of a Guevera t-shirt, failing, except in very small flashes, to ever actually express its subject's intellectual or emotional passion."

"Too emotionally dry to embrace but too ingenious to dismiss, Che is a fascinating, problematic film," argues Fernando F Croce in Slant. "You have to admire the stones of any movie that opens with a wordless lecture on Cuban geography but refuses to give any specifics about Castro's revolution, yet there's also the temptation to overpraise Soderbergh's structuralist approach more for what it eschews (speeches, romance, identification) than for what it offers. The problem is that, despite his desire to sidestep Hollywood bio-hooey, the director is unable to turn his chilly stance into an ideological perspective, like Roberto Rossellini did in his demythologized portraits of Louis XIV, Garibaldi and Pascal."

"Mr Soderbergh cagily evades Che's ugly side, notably his increasing commitment to violence and seemingly endless war, but the movie is without question political - even if it emphasizes romantic adventure over realpolitik - because, like all films, it is predicated on getting, spending and making money," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Online viewing tip. IFC has video from the press conference.

Earlier: Amy Taubin in Film Comment and reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 10/7: "What about governance?" asks the L Magazine's Mark Asch. "What about the implementation of Marxist principles? A movie like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which seems more and more to be one of the more crucial films of recent years, found the struggle to be inextricably linked to the social and political ideals informing it - and, for that matter, offered a genuinely ambiguous account of ideologically pure acts of violence.... This weighing of the rough justice of symbolic murder is an important thing for us to think about when we think about Che (my god The Motorcycle Diaries is a vapid movie), and for that matter the revolutionary ideal in general."

"This lack of concern for before and after, this faith in merely experiencing and not thinking or talking about Che, would give Soderbergh's film an almost Buddhist aspect were it not for the film's peculiar, fundamentalist faith in the personality cult of its titular guerrilla," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Soderbergh seems to believe that by merely reciting two big moments in his subject's life, with a lot of research and little analysis, the real Che will stand up."

Updates, 10/8: "Che is free of cliche and achieves a degree of emphatic insight and sharp characterization that deserves to be called revolutionary," writes Jürgen Fauth. "The Argentine and The Guerrilla belong to different genres, and the juxtaposition between the rousing spectacle and the clammy tragedy sheds a telling light on our expectations: you can't avoid the creeping suspicion that, if Soderbergh had left his RED camera prototype on the wide-screen setting and turned up the saturation, Che might have succeeded in Bolivia after all."

Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the press conference.

"Forget the anxiety of influence: Steven Soderbergh's anti-epic Che is haunted from first frame to last by the anxiety of legend," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at Reverse Shot. "Against the unshakable confidence exhibited by his subject, Soderbergh evidences a conspicuously nervous and hesitating appreciation of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. This approach likely results from such a project's unavoidable confrontation with the pop culture legacy of Che, as exemplified by the multiple generations of college-aged (very) would-be revolutionaries commodifying their dissent by sporting classic Chewear (featuring That Photo), likely manufactured in some third-world sweatshop. There's probably no other 20th-century political figure, and symbol, as widely recognized and less understood than Guevara, and the gap between image and person is so wide that Soderbergh's seemingly courageous decision to address it by being oblique and indirect leads him to the very place he wishes to avoid: mystification."

Updates, 10/10: Are younger critics frustrated (or just bored) with Che because for the most part, we don't bring an emotional, historical or intellectual relationship to its subject to the viewing experience?" asks Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Or are we just braindead children with the attention spans of infants? Or both?"

"Rigorous and inspired, shot with fluidity and unassuming grace on the Red camera, it does begin to feel a bit labored and claustrophobic in its final hour, but so be it - these are the exact emotions Che Guevara's fool-hearted attempt to bring a Marxist revolution to a peasant deep, Catholic country like Bolivia ought to inspire," writes Brandon Harris. "This is an essential film."

Update, 10/14: "I admire the ingenuity of the concept, and the rigor with which Soderbergh has executed it," writes Nelson Kim in Hammer to Nail. "He pulls off some impressive set pieces, and conveys a powerful sense of shifting moods. But ultimately, nothing that happens within the film is quite as compelling as the conceptual brilliance of its structure."

Update, 10/25: "Problematic as portrait, the film fascinates as a mess of artistic choices - some bold, some easy, many good in theory if not in effect," writes Eric Hynes for Stop Smiling.

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2008 7:44 AM