The Motorcycle Diaries

While his visage may have adorned many a college dorm room over the past three decades, Che Guevara remains an enigmatic and often misunderstood figure. Director Steven Soderbergh is slated to tackle Guevara's years as a revolutionary leader in a biopic due out next year, but in the meantime, those curious about the face that launched a thousand red t-shirts can sate their appetites by checking out Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries (2004).

Published posthumously, The Motorcycle Diaries were the journals kept by a young Guevara – then a slight, asthmatic medical student – during a 7500-mile trek that took him and a companion, Dr. Alberto Granado, through various South American countries in 1952. These travels, Salles asserts, played a major role in awakening Guevara's political consciousness and shaping his beliefs.

As a 23-year old from a bourgeois Argentinean family, Ernesto Guevara (who would be given the nickname "Che" during the trip) shows few signs of the leader he would become. Pensive and withdrawn, he embarks on the trip with Granado in order to conduct medical research at a leper colony in Peru. Granado, however, is more interested in meeting new people (with a particular emphasis on young females) and seeing how the world operates outside of their insular Buenos Aires existence.

The journey starts out innocently enough, with a pit stop at the posh country home of Che's girlfriend, Chichina. However, the further the two men remove themselves from their homeland, the more they begin to encounter people from vastly different walks of life. Suffering and poverty are widespread, and after talking to the migrants they pass along the way, Che begins to develop an acute sense of empathy for their plight.

Although the film's premise – tracing the seeds of political activism in a young man who would become an icon – is an intriguing one, Salles presents it in a disappointingly pedestrian manner. While he undoubtedly comes armed with good intentions (to the extent where the word "Ernesto" doesn't only apply to the lead character), the film unfolds like a travelogue edited by the staff of The Guardian.

At various points in the picture, Salles employs black-and-white images of the migrants and lepers, clearly striving to recreate the striking photographic images captured by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans during the Depression, and by cinematographer Gregg Toland in John Ford's version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940). However, Salles's use of this technique succeeds only in reducing the immediacy of the poverty on display, rendering it a problem of a time and place far removed from our own. The people in the images seem proud but distant, and are not given enough room in the movie for their characters to fully resonate.

In the midst of all this heavy-handed political commentary, only the leads, Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna, make much of an impression. Bernal, who has already appeared in three of the most exciting films of this decade (Amores Perros, Y Tu Mamá También, and La Mala Educación), turns in a thoughtful performance as Che, registering all the facets of his complicated journey from naïve young student to sensitive, worldly man. De la Serna, on the other hand, is robust and charismatic in a role that provides most of the film's levity.

In the end, however, Salles fails to let the audience come to its own conclusions about Che's political awakening, instead preferring to drum his own ideas into their heads.