The Motorcycle Diaries Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 12th, 2004
Jonathan Richards
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
Directed by Walter Salles
Rated R, 126 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles
HIT THE ROAD, CHE
The child, as William Wordsworth observed, is father of the man, and buried inside each public figure is the young man or woman who formed the mature personality. The Motorcycle Diaries offers us a romantic look at a few formative months in the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the man who would become a world-famous icon of posters, tee shirts, and revolution.
In January of 1952 the 24-year-old Guevara (Gael García Bernal of Y Tu Mama Tambien) had finished his second year of medical school when he and his best friend, a biochemist named Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna, a second cousin of Guevara), decided to take a road trip. Riding double on "The Mighty One (La Poderosa)", a beat-up 1939 Norton 500 ("You can fix anything with wire!"), they set out from Buenos Aires to see the continent, heading south to Tierra del Fuego, up the length of Chile, through Peru and into Venezuela – a journey of more than 8,000 kilometers. The bike (despite the title) did not make it; the young men did.
The movie combines standard road trip/buddy movie conventions with the internalized journey of an awakening consciousness of injustice in the world. It's Easy Rider meets The Grapes of Wrath. The guys set out guided by the beacons of adventure and sex. They hope to sleep with girls, preferably sisters, in every village and town of South America. But an early stop is at the hacienda where Ernesto's girlfriend (Mía Maestro) lives with her patrician parents, who cast a cold eye on the young medical student. She promises to wait for him if it's not too long, a tepid commitment that predictably lasts only through a few tanks of gas before the "Dear Ernesto" letter reaches him. To give the lady her due, maybe she sensed something; by the end of the trip there is no chance he would ever have passed her way again. The early part of the movie is mostly thrills, chills, and plenty of spills as the buddies bicker and bond. In southern Chile, as they romance a pair of sisters, we learn the origin of the nickname "Che" – according to the girls, it's the way the Argentines speak. As they roll on north, there's some slapstick comedy, including a weak, out-of-character scene where Che bullies a woman and they get chased by an angry mob.
Che complicates their journey with a stubborn insistence on telling the truth, where Alberto's prescription of a little sugar-coating might score them more food and female companionship. By the time they pass into Peru, the seeds of radicalism have been planted. By the flickering light of a campfire they hear the first of a series of tales of the oppression of the poor by the rich. The farther north they go the more injustice they see – a young farming couple forced off their land, starving workers mistreated by harsh foremen. Che grows increasingly thoughtful and introspective, despite Alberto's robust efforts to keep his mind on girls. As they look down on the wonders of Machu Picchu, the future revolutionary wonders how "a civilization that created this could be destroyed to produce something like Lima." One of the destinations of the two young medics is a leper colony in Peru where they volunteer, and there Che's social conscience deepens in the face of the suffering of the sick. The colony straddles a river; the lepers live on one of its banks, the healthy staff on the other. On the night of a party thrown at the clinic for his twenty-fourth birthday, the asthmatic Che plunges into the river, ignoring the pleas of Alberto, and swims across to the side where the poor and afflicted are. His personal Rubicon has been crossed, you understand, and there will be no turning back.
Both principal actors are excellent, but it is the soft-eyed, soulful Bernal who gives this story its heartbeat. His enormous charm keeps us involved even through stretches of thin episodic narrative. He combines the sensitivity and the strength that are the foundations of the revolutionary he will become. What we do not see foreshadowed is the killer. The only hint of violence Che exhibits here is when he throws a stone at a truck driven by exploiting bosses. We do not see the rigid ideologue. It's a gentle, saintly character that Bernal and director Salles give us; this is a man who might have gone on to become Mahatma Ghandi.
It's an engrossing journey for the most part, and many of the images of South America provided by cinematographer Eric Gautier are breathtaking. This account is based on the actual diaries Che kept on the journey, which were discovered in a knapsack years after his death. They were published in 1993 as Diarios de Motocicleta: Notas de Viaje. The other source material is Granado's memoir, Con el Che por America Latina. Granado, still living in Cuba in his eighties, appears in a screen-filling closeup at the end of the film.
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