Che

Although he has certainly directed his share of big-budget “Hollywood” films (Erin Brockovich, Ocean's Eleven, Contagion), Steven Soderbergh has made a number of personal, experimental films that I find more interesting. Traffic, for example. Or his first feature-length film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. One of his more recent films feels like an epic but has the sensibility and politics of the personal films. I'm talking about Che.

Che (2008), a two-part, five-hour film, starring Benicio del Toro as the Argentine revolutionary, isn't wholly successful, but it is always interesting. It's a bit flawed by being too long (Just how many times do we need to watch guerrillas hiking through a Cuban jungle?) and by a few other missteps (Hey, that's Matt Damon in a cameo speaking Spanish!), but nonetheless, Che continually challenges its viewers. It asks us, for example, to admire the commitment of one man, Che Guevara, to his ideals, even if we don't agree with those ideals. Moreover, it asks us to pay attention as the narrative is fractured by flashbacks that explore just what made Che, a physician with severe asthma, into a dedicated socialist determined to lift peasants around the world out of poverty through agrarian reform and education. In between raids on Batista's army in Cuba in the late 1950s, for example, Che would give physical exams to the local farmers or teach their children how to read, all the while serving as an exemplar for the other revolutionaries.

Benicio del Toro, also one of the film's producers, worked more than a decade to finance this labor of love. Although Soderbergh had agreed to help produce the film, he only became the director at the last minute when Terrence Malick dropped out. (It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the spacey Malick, director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and Tree of Life, would have done with this film.) At any rate, Soderbergh grabbed the helm and subsequently produced a thoughtful film about a complex man.