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There's a vaguely bothersome echo in Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features, 9.24) that
nobody in Hollywood journalist circles seems to want to talk about...but it's there.
It doesn't trouble me to any great degree, although it's grown into a slight roadblock in terms of my core
feelings about the lead character, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who is wonderfully played by Gael Garcia Bernal.
The echo I'm speaking of certainly has no place in Diaries itself, which is essentially a young
man's film about the growing of a heart. The story is about the socio-political awakening of Guevara
over the course of a road trip he took across South America with a friend, Albert Granado
(Rodrigo de la Serna), in 1952.
Diaries isn't about politics or dogma, but
compassion. The invisible sub-heading is not "How I Became a Communist" but "How I Happened to See Beyond
Myself and Realize How Badly People are Hurting."
But Salles' film tells only a little bit about who Guevara was in '52, and nothing at all about what he would
soon become.
Guevara's Diaries adventure happened only two and a half years before he
hooked up with Fidel Castro in Mexico, about three years before he sailed to Cuba to join the revolution,
and only about seven years before Guevara was organizing hundreds of firing-squad executions in the wake of
Castro's Cuban takeover.
The Motorcycle Diaries is about a young man finding his humanity,
but as Guevara got older and tougher his life seemed to be less about caring than anger, vengeance and a
Marxist philosophical purity that seems fairly bizarre by today's standards.
In the movie Guevara flirts with various women, shows kindness to strangers, and cares for lepers in
a hospital along the Amazon. He's an unequivocal sweetheart.
In real life Guevara was a
hard-core cadre who apparently came to believe more and more in black and white moral extremes.
Oppressors bad, revolutionaries good, etc. Hate, it seems, was as much of a driving force in his life
as love, and perhaps a bit more so.
In a 1967 speech, he said the following:
"Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and
beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective,
and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."
* * *
To continue with the rest of the column, simply click over to the
new site (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com). Oh, and while you're there?
Please bookmark it.
I don't know why this simple strategy of forcing (is that too
assertive a term?) regular Hollywood Elsewhere readers go to the new
site didn't hit me earlier, but it didn't. In any event, an
abbreviated Movie Poop Shoot version of the column will continue in
this space for many weeks to come. Eventually, sooner or later, this
policy will no longer be neccesary.
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