Film Review: The Motorcycle Diaries
By Jim
Smith
Go see it! This is a film that
rewards on many levels. It’s about two young friends on a great adventure.
It is a travelogue of much of South America. And most of all, it's about why an
Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara became the great revolutionary, Che.
The film begins in 1952 with Che (played by
Gael Garcia Bernal) and his friend, Alberto Granado (played by Rodrigo de la
Serna) in Buenos Aires getting ready to ride thousands of miles around South
America on an old Norton motorcycle. Che's middle-class upbringing is clearly
established. He is a medical student, soon to be a doctor, with a girl friend
waiting to become his wife.
But
Ernesto is no ordinary person as the film soon established. When he is
confronted with grinding poverty and oppression of miners and the indigeous
peoples in Peru, not to mention lepers, he rises to the occasion.
Within a few years, Che will become
the best known, and best loved, revolutionary in the world. His martyrdom at the
hands of the CIA in Bolivia in 1967, only adds to his stature. His beatific face
looks up at us from t-shirts, and down at us from posters and murals everywhere
we go. You can buy Che on the Boardwalk, you can read Che in any bookstore, and
now you can watch the young Che at the movies. Is a sequel in the
works?
If, as some say, the Beatles
were more popular than Jesus in the 60s, Che is the new Jesus, updated for
worldwide struggles against global capitalism. Watching Motorcycle Diaries
fulfills the same function in the Che phenomena that the biblical stories of the
young Jesus disputing with the learned priests in the Temple does in that story.
After seeing the film, one understands better why Che gave up his comfortable
bougeois life in Argentina to suffer privations fighting for liberation in Cuba,
the Congo, and Bolivia and ultimately dying - for
us.
Motorcycle Diaries will be a huge
blockbuster in Latin America and the Third World. Even in the U.S., it may
inspire some young people who are despondent about the political choices
presented to them as “leaders of the free world.”
Che’s message to them –
and us – would be to fight for change, now matter what the odds against
us. He would, undoubtably, agree with the slogan of the World Social Forum:
“A better world is possible.”
Posted: Fri - October 1, 2004 at 02:50 PM