The Motorcycle Diaries
Even if you didn't come of age in the 1960s, the name Che Guevara remains singular in its saintly potency. The famous pop poster of Che was like a rendering of the Marxist messiah, that star on his beret as bright as a halo. Other Communist leaders -- Mao, Ho Chi Minh, or Che's compatriot Fidel Castro -- had the disadvantage of having to run states, but Che, who died in 1967 (he was killed by the Bolivian army, acting in concert with the CIA and possibly Castro himself), was enshrined forever as the holy freedom fighter of the people.
In The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles' gorgeously shot South American road movie, the young actor Gael García Bernal (Y Tu Mamá También) plays the 23-year-old medical student Ernesto Guevara in 1952, years before he became the martyr/guru of Latin American communism. The movie has no pretense, really, of dealing with uprise politics. Though clearly meant to reveal the seeds of Che's revolutionary conscience, it is simply the story of two buddies -- handsome, plaintive Ernesto and his beefier, rowdier pal, the biochemist Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna) -- as they climb onto a noisy Norton 500 motorcycle in Buenos Aires and make their way up the east coast of South America, putt-putting through the ravishing green mountains of Chile and Peru. Along the way, they enjoy some very mild adventures with girls and local ruffians, and Ernesto opens his eyes to the peasants, poverty, and quiet struggle that dot the Edenic landscape. The plain, formative human side of a man who becomes a mythic leader: That sounds like a resonant idea for a movie. Except that The Motorcycle Diaries is glazed over by its worship of Che Guevara. Bernal, with his elegant planed face and serious eyebrows, is a great camera subject, but his Ernesto is nothing more than a sweet, courteous, honorable, rather passive bourgeois. He has little fire and few hints of ego or inner conflict. He's all positive qualities, like the hero of a great-man biography for fifth graders, and his noble blandness works insidiously. It allows the audience to project their hindsight fantasies of Che onto Bernal's deeply uninteresting performance.
Ernesto and Alberto end up at a leper colony, where they spend weeks tending the sick with brave devotion. We can believe that Ernesto will make a fine physician, or even the future leader of Doctors Without Borders, but is it too much to ask, Where's a glimmer of the revolutionary? The man who embraced violence for change? The film operates under the spectacularly simpleminded idea that Marxism came down to ''caring.'' In an age of war without borders, perhaps that idea now exerts a reassuring cachet. The Motorcycle Diaries could kick off a new movie trend: Communist nostalgia.
