Che

It's not everyday that you see a four-hour-and-seventeen minute movie. Even rarer is when the movie blows you away.

On Wednesday when I took the train into Cambridge, I had been half dreading, and half looking forward to, seeing Che, the two-part biopic epic about Ernesto "Che" Guevara directed by Stephen Soderbergh.

Over the previous week, I'd been completely engrossed in reading Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination by Lamar Waldron. It is a phenomenal book, extremely well-researched, and blows away just about anything else I've read recently about the events of November 1963.

If you haven't yet read it, or absorbed what's revealed in it, then it is very difficult to talk meaningful about what happened. Yet many of what is in the book was not known until 2005, when the files were made available. Suffice it to say that Cuba plays a very important role.

In order to understand the book, I wound up doing a lot of background research about the Cuban Revolution for the first time. All this research came in very handy when watching the movie.

I got off the train at Kendall Square and walked around the M.I.T. campus for about an hour on a cold sunny day before heading to the Landmark Theater nearby. I bought a fifteen dollar mantinee ticket for the "roadshow" edition of the movie. It started promptly at one p.m. without trailers. There was a fifteen minute intermission after part one, then the second half was shown. There were no credits at the end.

I had been dreading the possible grueling length of the two-part epic, but once the movie settled in, I realized my fears were overblown. The movie flew by. It could have been an hour longer, and I probably still would have enjoyed it.

You don't need to know anything about the Cuban Revolution, but it does certainly add to the appreciation. At the very beginning of both parts is a silent animated geography lesson for American audiences. In the first movie, you get to learn all the names of the former provinces of Cuba, and the major cities that will appear in the movie. In the second half, you get to learn about Bolivia and South America.

The two halves of Che actually turn out to be very different, much like the man himself. It is almost as if they were directed by different people.

In the first half, we follow the revolutionaries from the 1955 onward, when Fidel Castro first meets Guevara in Mexico City, followed by the epic boat ride to the southeastern tip of the island with eighty other men. Only twelve people on the boat will eventually live to see the Revolution become successful with the overthrow of the Batista junta.

The first half is buoyant, as Guevara and the rebels learn to fight in the jungle, and gain the support of the peasants, behind Castro's charismatic leadership. Their movement keeps building momentum as they take on the Army. Eventually the major cities fall to them, and Batista abdicates before the rebels even enter Havana. The first half ends with this triumph.

The second half is completely different, in both tone and narrative, as it follows Guevara in his attempts to instigate a revolution in Bolivia. Taken together the two halves of the movie provide a dissertation on what makes for a successful, or unsuccessful, revolution. Everything that went right is Cuba, went wrong in Bolivia.

I'm sympathetic to the criticisms of the movie that it glosses over the atrocities committed by Guevara and others in clamping down on dissent after their takeover of Cuba in 1959. But that really wasn't the subject of the movie. Even after two full-length movies, there is still plenty of room for additional commentary on the Cuban Revolution. I certainly would like to see more.

I'd love to see a movie made out of Lamar Waldron's book as well. That would certainly be mindblowing. I feel like I've only begun to scratch the surface of the topic.

Che may well indeed be the best motion picture released in 2008. It may wind up at the top of my list, when all is said and done. Soderbergh has created a masterpiece that will stand the test of time.