Two halves don’t make a whole: Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ a plodding look at the revolutionary

Stephen Soderbergh has said "Che" was made in Spanish, Ernesto "Che" Guevara's native tongue, so as to honor the man by avoiding "the language of the imperialists."

This is clever salesmanship, bound to thrill the throngs of Che T-shirt and poster enthusiasts, who are everywhere. The Iraqi who threw his shoe at Bush has a Guevara poster in his Baghdad apartment.

But even die-hard fans will have their cheeks benumbed during "Che," a four-hour, two-part epic that brings out Soderbergh's weakness for stylistic doodling, which sometimes strangles his material.

In the language of the imperialists, the word for this movie is "Solaris."

Still, if you're determined to see it, you have a couple of options. During the first week, you can pay one price to see the two halves of the movie separated by a one-hour intermission (Che would approved of this super-saver option).

After a week or so, the distributor will show part one and part two as separate films. This isn't arbitrary hacking - Soderbergh filmed each half in two different styles, with different structures and different cameras.

The first half, covering Guevara's contribution to Fidel Castro's overthrow of Cuba's Batista dictatorship, is the most watchable. Part one at least has the advantage of a successful military trajectory: popular uprising overthrows an exploitative government.

Che is pitched at his most heroic - healer, educator, humble adviser. Soderbergh also jazzes up the narrative, interposing combat exposition with excerpts from Guevara's famous U.N. speech.

Part two is strictly linear and strictly dull - an unbroken line that follows Che to his fatal misadventure in Bolivia. The mood is suffocating, as is the film, set in the country's arid mountains and filmed in desaturated colors.

It chronicles Che's increasingly suicidal march through the Andes, leading a group of Cuban mercenaries and desertion-prone Bolivians, a "column" unable to win the support of wary peasants and certainly no match for CIA-trained Bolivian rangers.

Soderbergh seems to want to capture the doomed nature of this enterprise, condemned to fail when Guevara's mission was disowned by Bolivia's communist party. This turn of events that might have made more sense if Soderbergh hadn't skipped Che's life in the aftermath of Castro's victory, when Guevara and Castro split over the USSR's influence in Latin American affairs.

You could argue that the director is successful; the futility of the uprising is obvious to everyone but Guevara, and Soderbergh leaves the audience to decide whether this obstinacy is reckless or heroic.

Soderbergh's idea seems to be that a carefully accurate retelling of events, no matter how trivial, will allow some sort of truth to emerge. But it's a tough sit - two hours of Guevara issuing mundane tactical commands to a confusing roster of characters that Soderbergh does not bother to define.

Under these restrictions, there is no room here for Del Toro to maneuver. His Guevara is a stoic enigma and the movie an unromantic ordeal that seems as interested in Guevara's asthma as his revolutionary ideals.

The overall result is a four-hour marathon that's long on detail and short on perspective, or anything that feels like genuine vision. *

Produced by Laura B*ckford, Ben*c*o Del Toro, d*rected by Steven Soderbergh, wr*tten by Peter Buchanan, d*str*buted by IFC F*lms.