Che (2008/Criterion Collection Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B     Sound: B     Extras: B     Film: B

 

 

Getting back to the real filmmaking that made him a force to be reckoned with, Steven Soderbergh has made one of the most ambitious projects of his career with Che (2008), a two part character study/biography on the controversial Che Guevara, the popular Marxist revolutionary who was eventually betrayed and killed.  You see his image all over the place as empty fashion statement, but little is known about him, few films have ever attempted to examine him and in the end, he became a modern-day Trotsky: too subversive for the subversives and had to be killed.

 

In a really impressive performance, Benicio del Toro is the title character throughout his short life, being interviewed and unable to answer questions in the first half the two-part epic, but we learn soon enough in flashbacks the answers to those questions and much more.  Shot in Spanish, the film is split into two subsections: The Argentine and Guerilla.  Like all the great biopics and epics, you feel like you get a privileged look at history and the people in it in raw form and the work never glorifies or undercuts the man.  Instead, it shows his motivations, rise and fall.  It shows that he shined best when he was fighting the good fight, his primary reason for becoming who he became and Soderbergh has great screenplays for each half by Peter Buchanan and Benjamin A. Van Der Veen (who joins Buchanan on the second script).

 

This is a very thought-out work with great attention to detail and an ambitious attempt to cover as much history as possible and of Guevara’s military campaigns, but the history always has irony in that the victories were ultimately dark ones, his success did not change the eventual end of the Cold War (though Soderbergh may be implying had he lived, Guevara may have given world Marxist and Communist movements more long-term success) and the very idea of doing any project on the man may make Neo-Conservative and corporate America too nervous, which is why you are likely to not have heard of this release unless you are a film fan.

 

The cast is a huge plus and along with The Informer, if anyone thought Soderbergh had lost his filmmaking abilities after too many Ocean’s package deals, the good news is that he is back.  Don’t miss this one.  Che is worth going out of your way for.

 

 

The 1080p image has different aspect ratios for each part, the first being 2.35 X 1 (credited as 2.39, but the same difference just about) and the second part 1.78 X 1, all in a mix of color and monochrome/black and white.  Soderbergh has now turned to the increasingly popular digital high definition RED 4K HD camera to shoot his work.  It has been rarely used so far to any great effect, but here, he is able to make it rich and compelling, as well as film-like in a breakthrough I doubt few could pull off with only a few sections shot on 16mm and Super 16mm film.  Besides financial considerations, the digital gives the story a chance to be examined in a new post-Cold War way and the editing style is still of Guevara’s time.  There are still too many shots that show they are High Definition, ruining the illusion (i.e., the footage could not come from that time since this technology was not invented yet), but this is not revisionist history (read a lie) and plays back very nicely throughout, which is good, especially considering its length.  There is some shaky camerawork, but in a rare occurrence anymore, it is not a substitute for no-talent camerawork.

 

The DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix is a mix of monophonic and location-type sounds (with their audio fallout) along with actual sounds in the narrative sense, so you get an interesting soundfield throughout.  It may not feature consistently active surround activity, but it is smart, rich and warm enough to stand out with character in other ways.

 

Extras are many and include a poster, 24-page booklet, feature-length audio commentary tracks by Guevara scholar Jon Lee Anderson, trailer, 20+ minutes of deleted scenes, making of featurette, Che & The Digital Cameras Revolution, two blocks of Interviews From Cuba and vintage 1967 End Of The Revolution featurette made in Bolivia after Guevara’s death.

 

As usual, this massive deluxe treatment by Criterion is what put them on the map and keeps them there.  You watch the movie, then go through al of the extras and you realize what an achievement and accomplishment this all is.  Like Spike Lee’s biopic of Malcolm X, Soderbergh had some reason to believe that this could have become a hit because of sudden interest in the man, but both films came out to underwhelming box office proving any interest was more fickle than it should have been.

 

In the case of Che, it is a project that is more like an ambitious epic from the 1960s to early 1980s (like Prince Of The City, Lawrence Of Arabia, Patton, etc.) that the major studios used to back when more people who loved film and knew how to make them controlled the studios, but Soderbergh took on the subject independently and succeeds highly.  In the years to come, people will see Che and realize it should have been a surprise sleeper hit.

 

Now those people with T-Shirts can find out who that guy is that they are wearing on their shirts.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo