The Motorcycle Diaries Review
by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)September 22nd, 2004
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The true story of a motorcycle trip that
revolutionist Che Guevara took with a friend and
that was the source of many of Guevara's later
political opinions. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
When Ernesto "Che" Guevara was in his early twenties in 1952 with a rudimentary medical education, he and his friend Alberto Granado took an old motorcycle, left Buenos Aires, and went on a road trip to see first their native Argentina and then the rest of South America. They actually visited only Argentina, Chile, and Peru. What they saw molded their lives.
The journey was initially a carefree one for pleasure until they started seeing the poverty and pain of the native population at the mercy of the wealthy. In the course of the film they meet a doctor who is committed to revolution, reform, and helping the poor. The youths toy with revolutionary ideas and work for a time in a leper colony. Eventually, as their diaries told, Ernesto and Alberto went their separate ways. Ernesto, of course became a seminal revolutionary of the Cuban Revolution. Alberto devoted his life to medicine, helping the poor in very different ways. The story of this journey is dramatized in the new film THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, based on the diaries that the two kept on their trip.
Walter Salles directs the film in two halves really. The first half of the film is a fairly lighthearted road picture. The boys may not always get along with each other, but the problems they face are more or less what they expected and the style is carefree. In the second hour of the film things get more serious for the two young men. They encounter some farmers who have been forced off of their land by land speculators. For the first time they meet people not just insolvent at the moment but who are profoundly poor. They start thinking of political reform. A scene which was just a paragraph in the original diaries becomes a central metaphor in the film: a swim across a river becomes a decision of commitment versus shirking commitment.
The politics in the film is present but generally is kept mild even relative to a film like THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Perhaps the political impact is stronger if the viewer bears in mind that this is the famous revolutionary. Even then it is true mostly in the second half.
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is less a revolutionary tract and more a relic of the life of a will-be revolutionary.
Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
More on 'The Motorcycle Diaries'...
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