Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che’: ‘Almost Unreleasable in its Current Form’

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 05.28.08 | 2:07 PM ET

That seems to be the consensus of those who saw the biopic at the Cannes Film Festival. While Benicio Del Toro (pictured) won the best actor award for his performance of the rebel who launched a million T-shirts, critics say Soderbergh’s highly anticipated biopic, which runs no less than four and a half hours, isn’t likely to find its way into theaters soon. The film was made in two parts, the first covering the revolution in Cuba, the second focusing on Guevara’s ill-fated adventures in Bolivia. It’s “almost unreleasable in its current form in any country in the world,” critic John Powers said yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air.

The film still has no distributor. It would have to be cut down considerably to have any chance of that, Powers says.

The trouble is, “I’m not sure it will get much better if you cut it way down,” he says. “It has an artistic integrity of its own, but it’s a very perverse artistic integrity.”

The New York Times found that the film “has some big problems as well as major virtues.”

Writes A. O. Scott: “In between the two periods covered in ‘Che,’ Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro’s soulful and charismatic performance, allows Mr. Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest.”

“The Motorcycle Diaries,” which I loved for its wanderlust-inducing qualities, avoided Guevara’s brutality by focusing on his youth. In this new film, Soderbergh covers Guevara’s later years, so it’s surprising to hear that he avoided much of the messy and complicated stuff.

Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of all this.