THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The true story of a motorcycle trip that
revolutionist Che Guevara took with a friend and
that was the source of many of Guevara's later
political opinions. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
When Ernesto "Che" Guevara was in his early twenties in 1952 with
a rudimentary medical education, he and his friend Alberto Granado
took an old motorcycle, left Buenos Aires, and went on a road trip
to see first their native Argentina and then the rest of South
America. They actually visited only Argentina, Chile, and Peru.
What they saw molded their lives.
The journey was initially a carefree one for pleasure until they
started seeing the poverty and pain of the native population at
the mercy of the wealthy. In the course of the film they meet a
doctor who is committed to revolution, reform, and helping the
poor. The youths toy with revolutionary ideas and work for a time
in a leper colony. Eventually, as their diaries told, Ernesto and
Alberto went their separate ways. Ernesto, of course became a
seminal revolutionary of the Cuban Revolution. Alberto devoted
his life to medicine, helping the poor in very different ways.
The story of this journey is dramatized in the new film THE
MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, based on the diaries that the two kept on
their trip.
Walter Salles directs the film in two halves really. The first
half of the film is a fairly lighthearted road picture. The boys
may not always get along with each other, but the problems they
face are more or less what they expected and the style is
carefree. In the second hour of the film things get more serious
for the two young men. They encounter some farmers who have been
forced off of their land by land speculators. For the first time
they meet people not just insolvent at the moment but who are
profoundly poor. They start thinking of political reform. A
scene which was just a paragraph in the original diaries becomes a
central metaphor in the film: a swim across a river becomes a
decision of commitment versus shirking commitment.
The politics in the film is present but generally is kept mild
even relative to a film like THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Perhaps the
political impact is stronger if the viewer bears in mind that this
is the famous revolutionary. Even then it is true mostly in the
second half.
THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is less a revolutionary tract and more a
relic of the life of a will-be revolutionary.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38670 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1321883 X-RT-TitleID: 1136253 X-RT-AuthorID: 1309 X-RT-RatingText: 7/10
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