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FILM REVIEW: The Motorcycle Diaries05 Aug 2005.
Walter Salles' film 'The Motorcycle Diaries' is a coming-of-age road trip whose protagonist happens to be the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara. While biopics are notoriously unimaginative rehashings of a celebrity's life, Salles is more interested in exploring and challenging myths than reinforcing them, elevating the film above the usual pitfalls.
Before his days as a guerrilla in the Cuban jungle, Ernesto Guevara was a Buenos Aires medical student struggling to understand his place in the world. At this point in his life, Guevara is politically unaware -- the only sign of his future idealism is his devotion to his patients and a blunt, direct honesty that he feels is the only way to deal with others. Feeling restless and confined by his middle-class career path, Ernesto (Gabriel García Bernal) and his friend Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) take off on a motorcycle to investigate a continent they are eager to experience but know little about. Traveling through the Argentine countryside, they find outposts of people clinging to a European way of life in isolated mansions -- incongruous neighbors to Southern Chile, where both the land and people are rougher. As they venture North into Andean lands, they encounter another side of Latin America -- faces of poverty, which are frequently Indian. To Guevara, the grafti! ng of European cities and industries onto the Indigenous population is disturbing, though their ability to resist in varying degrees is inspiring. The two travelers arrive at a leper colony in the Amazon full of people from different races and nationalities. They immediately chafe against the rules of the head nun, who enforces a separation between the patients and staff while simultaneously hard-selling Catholicism. During their residency, Alberto notices a change in Ernesto, who seems pensive and uncertain about his future. Their confrontations with the physical and human geography of South America have changed Guevara's philosophies about how to best serve his patients, and moves him to his first political act -- one based not on politics, but on the unification of people.
The film echoes Che's interest in a united Latin America by bringing together an array of Latin talent (Bernal is Mexican, De la Serna is Argentine, and Salles is Brazilian). Even if his presence fuses a hearthrob aura to the role of Che, García makes a valiant attempt to characterize Guevara as a confused young man rather than a visionary on the path to his destiny. De la Serna is a scene-stealer, making his character more than a side-kick but a magnetic personality in his own right, with his own take on the journey and his own future ahead of him. Salles' direction is assured, though those few moments when Che's political future is foreshadowed are a bit awkward (as is Salles' closing montage). Aside from this, he guides the film exactly into the territory it should be -- as a kind of prestige project (with backing by Robert Redford), it nevertheless deals with a subject and themes that could easily have been glossed up. Though Guevara's psychology is never quite b! roken open, it is because the purpose of the film is also to capture the character of Latin America itself. With Che acting as a tour guide of sorts, the journey gradually exposes the audience to the themes and variations that relate to all Latin America -- the legacy of Indigenous civilizations, the tragedy of their destruction, the differences between races and classes, and the efforts to resist exploitation both domestic and foreign. Granted, these are all staged (and well-shot) recreations, but they nevertheless relate to the Latin American experience -- one senses that Salles hopes they reach beyond Latin American borders. While slipping in these social concerns, Salles never forgets the bottom line and keeps the film entertaining. When making a film about an icon who symbolizes political idealism, some people are bound to be disappointed. While they might rather have seen a more politically-charged version of Che's early life, Salles' interpretation makes an effo! rt to remove him from that narrow reading and place him in a surprisingly entertaining film that presents us a pre-guerrilla Guevara as he is introduced to South America.
