Che, 12/08.

"It was nearly a decade ago that Steven Soderbergh and two partners, actor Benicio Del Toro and producer Laura Bickford, first discussed making a long, ambitious film about revolutionary Che Guevara," begins Lauren AE Schuker in the Wall Street Journal (via Movie City News):

It soon became apparent, however, that they were perhaps the only people in Hollywood willing to gamble on a four-hour epic made largely in Spanish.... Funded largely by foreign backers after the Hollywood studios passed, Che will open as a 257-minute film on Dec 12 and play for a single week in New York and Los Angeles; then, in January, IFC will reissue the epic as two separate two-hour films at theaters across the country before also releasing it on video on demand. Mr Soderbergh's struggles to get the film funded and released are signs of the mounting financing challenges facing filmmakers in today's Hollywood.

Updated through 12/13.

"In the piece I wrote about Che: Argentine, I described the inability of the first half of this epic to stand alone and, in Soderbergh's language, the strong 'response' necessary from Guerrilla to fully answer The Argentine's 'call'." Martha Polk, blogging from Santa Fe: "Well, answer it did. For as much as The Argentine is a perfect climb, Guerrilla is a terrifying plummet and, as I had imagined (with the help of Amy Taubin and Steven Soderbergh's words), the two films only make sense when read together."

Anthony Kaufman has a good long talk with Soderbergh at indieWIRE.

Terrence Rafferty runs through a swift primer on revolutions as depicted on screen, focusing particularly on Russia, France and Cuba, and then:

Che Guevara was literally the embodiment of the romantic notion that unyielding dedication and unceasing struggle could achieve the liberation of all the world's oppressed, and this is such an attractive idea that one may prefer not to dwell on his humorlessness, his rigidity, his icy ruthlessness. Most revolutions are necessary, most end up betraying the ideals they claimed to represent, and most revolutionaries are at least mildly sociopathic. "Revolutions attract crazies; it's a well-known fact," the French leftist filmmaker Chris Marker says in his brilliant documentary essay The Last Bolshevik (1993). But he says it sort of tenderly.

For a NYT Magazine cover story, Roger Cohen visits Cuba on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the revolution:

Turning west along the seafront that first gusty day, I encountered a strange sight that summoned the United States from its tenebrous presence: a phalanx of poles, topped with snapping flags displaying a five-pointed Cuban star against a black backdrop, bearing down on the eastern facade of a boxy concrete-and-glass structure that houses the US Interests Section in Havana. The flag barricade was put up to block an electronic billboard on the side of the building. In 2006, US officials put political slogans on the billboard; it now transmits news not other wise accessible to Cubans.

This seafront tableau is laughable: the United States unreeling red-lettered strips of unread news into a sea of black flags and defiance. It captures all the fruitless paralysis of the Cuban-American confrontation, a tense stasis Barack Obama has vowed to overcome. Diplomatic relations have been severed since 1961; a US trade embargo has been in place almost as long; the cold war has been over for almost two decades. To say the US-Cuban relationship is anachronistic would be an understatement.

But changing it won't be easy.

Online viewing tip. #1. Soderbergh tells Ray Pride about working with the Red camera.

Online viewing tip #2. A clip from Che at the WSJ.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York.

Update, 12/8: Benicio Del Toro has brought Che to Havana and Carl DiOrio is there for the Hollywood Reporter: "The 30th annual Latin American Film Festival of Havana - or more simply, the Habana Film Festival - features 114 competing films from 14 countries in the region and elsewhere. But Steven Soderbergh's Che has been a publicity gift to the fest this year as the centerpiece of its noncompetitive special screenings, and its topliner was on hand to introduce the four-hour-plus film."

Updates, 12/9: The Playlist has a couple of nifty images from the roadshow flyer: "If it isn't obvious already, this epic is certainly going to make our top 10 list of 2008."

"Che is by no means a breezy sit, but no matter what your politics, it's a bracing tonic in a season of flaccid Oscar bait," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"It's important to remember that Che was not the only finely chiseled guerrilla worth making a movie about." Interview's Lucy Madison offers "a quick roundup of other revolutionary must-sees to keep you red-hot through the winter."

Updates, 12/10: "The Motorcycle Diaries and 20th Century Fox's long-ago debacle, Che!, were made to capitalize on the Guevara myth," writes J Hoberman in the Voice; "each, in its way, served to infuriate either Che's enemies or his fans. By contrast, Soderbergh's epic is neither romantic nor even particularly partisan. While the real Che may be (or may once have been) cool, the filmmaker's attitude is way cooler. Whatever heat star and co-producer Benicio Del Toro brings to the title role, Soderbergh's project is to search for the technocrat, which is to say, himself, in the original revolutionary rock star.... At its best, Che is both action film and ongoing argument. Each new camera setup seeks to introduce a specific idea - about Che or his situation - and every choreographed battle sequence is a sort of algorithm where the camera attempts to inscribe the event that is being enacted."

Nicolas Rapold talks with Soderbergh for the L Magazine.

Updates, 12/11: "Forget the anxiety of influence," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot: "Steven Soderbergh's anti-epic Che is haunted from first frame to last by the anxiety of legend.... 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."

"Out-perversing Gus Van Sant's Milk, Soderbergh makes a four-hour-plus biopic about a historical figure without providing a glimmer of charm or narrative coherence," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "One can't accuse Soderbergh of pandering to feel-good piety because Che proudly resists sentimentality about people's power, distribution of wealth, Marxist theology, radical chic or morbid celebrity."

Mark Olsen profiles Benicio Del Toro for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 12/13: "This is a very long song composed in about three notes," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its motifs are facial hair, tobacco smoke and earnest militant bombast.... In honoring the myth of Che as a kind of macho Marxist superman in whom thought and feeling, action and theory, passion and discipline are united, Mr Soderbergh and Mr Del Toro (a producer of the picture as well as its star) remove him from the realm of ordinary human sympathy.... Che, in other words, is epic hagiography."

"Soderbergh has effectively pissed off left-wing critics, right-wing critics and a certain number of mainstream viewers who just wanted a conventional, psychological-realist biopic," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his interview for Salon. "Instead, Che is something closer to the naturalistic novel or documentary journalism."

David Fear: "Soderbergh hasn't made the definitive cinematic statement as to who this man was, but he has pulled off something equally compelling: a meta-exploration about what it took to create a Marxist revolution and construct a marketable leftist messiah." Also in Time Out New York, John Sellers talks with Del Toro.

Richard Corliss:

Some people will question screenwriter Peter Buchman's narrow focus on two military campaigns - the successful rebellion that led to the taking of Havana, Guevara's disastrous operation in Bolivia nine years later - while ignoring Che's role in mass executions in Cuba after the revolution and his ill-advised adventures in West Africa (where Egypt's Nasser correctly predicted Guevara would be coming in as Tarzan among the natives). Others will wonder at the odd lack of dramatic incident among all the warfare. But you really can't argue with Buchman and Soderbergh about the movie they didn't make; a viewer must accept that they meant these to be bold strategies, and judge what's on the screen.

Our judgment is that the two-part Che is a halfway movie: too expensive (reportedly $61 million) to be relegated to art houses, too stiff and forbidding to appeal to any part of a mass audience.

Also in Time: "Behind the Scenes on the Set of Che," photos by Alex Harris and Bill Bamberger.

"The political realities of his legacy can be endlessly debated, but in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it," writes Sheri Linden in the Los Angeles Times.

"Soderbergh portrays Guevara as a man who, having seen the damage done by the powers running Latin America, is comfortable only when working to topple the system," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "The film keeps a fascinated focus on what it takes to stay committed to that aim."

More interviews with Del Toro: Sheila Johnston (Telegraph) and Chris Sullivan (Independent).

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2008 9:46 AM