An idyllic tale of a young man’s search for himself & the need for peasant-led communist revolution is so not 2004, particularly out in aptly named King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, that I wanted to check the year feature on my watch by the time I left Motorcycle Diaries. It’s a sweet little road movie, visually breath-taking, a kinder, gentler Easy Rider, albeit one that sees the harshness of the lives of the people whose land the protagonists ride (or, more often, push) their ancient Norton 500 through . . . at least until they sell it for scrap & take to traveling by foot, by thumb & by raft.
Maybe it’s because Walter Salles’ previous motion picture, Central Station, was a minor cross-over hit, or because Gael García Bernal starred in Y Tu Mama Tambien, much more than a minor crossover success, as well as Amores Perros, or perhaps it’s because Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Motorcycle Diaries’ protagonist, evolved “in real life” from the wide-eyed asthmatic med student of this film into “Che,” itinerant revolutionary & ultimate t-shirt icon, but somebody has an idea that this movie is going to do fairly well here north of the border. Maybe.
Films like this – and this is a good one, well executed – operate through the elaboration & extension of genre clichés that everyone in the audience always already knows – there are some scenes in the tougher physical climes of the Andes in which one swears that one is watching Frodo & Sam on one more climb, one more trek through the snow, the motorcycle itself turning into an ever heavier ring. At other moments in the film, tho, the ring’s role is played by $15 in U.S. currency Che has been given by his rich girlfriend on the off chance that this 8,000 mile trek through South America should lead them to the United States & the possibility of fashionable swimwear.
Rodrigo de la Serna’s Alberto is more Falstaff than Sam to Che’s Frodo, however, which creates something of an odd arc for the narrative as the quest for booty turns, once our lads have gotten into Peru & especially once they’ve arrived to do a three-week internship at a leper colony high in the Amazon, into a quest for social justice. Salles uses the region’s stunning beauty to soften what are really agitprop appearances of coal miners & communists & campesinos thrown off their land in the name of “progress.” This Frodo, it is worth noting, gives the ring – or at least the $15 – to the communists.
The film’s third act, the internship at the leper colony – real Hansen’s patients appear to have been used as actors here – is itself a set piece, complete with a nun in the role of Nurse Ratchet (or maybe Nurse Ratchet-lite – her worst punishment is to withhold meals to those who fail to attend mass). The patients are kept on one side of the river, literally, while the doctors & staff live on the other – the Amazon is no mere stream. The film’s climax comes on Che’s 24th birthday, which he celebrates by giving a political speech in the form of a toast to the doctors & staff (and it is to Salles’ credit that he makes it quite clear by the reaction shots of the colony’s staff that only Alberto has any clue what Che is actually saying), followed by a swim across the river to the colony itself, a lengthy & treacherous venture made no easier by Guevara’s asthmatic wheezing.
Perhaps the very best part of this movie – beyond the dramatic uses of scenery – are the little touches that Salles & García Bernal give to Che. When a leading expert in leprosy – Guevara’s prospective specialization in med school – hands him a book manuscript to read, Che tells his benefactor that it’s cliché ridden & badly done. This bluntness is both a virtue & a curse.
Guevara’s sense of propriety & lack of ease with himself (he's in denial over the severity of his ashtma attacks, he can’t dance, he can’t get his rich girlfriend to go beyond the simplest backseat fondling in the family car & he certainly won't lie just to be polite) just barely covers a rigid side – one that Alberto likes to tease & prod – that the audience knows will combine later with his idealism & anger in ways that are at once “liberating” & more than a little toxic. Are we intended to catch the irony when Che tells the doctor to “stick to what you know best?” The film doesn’t answer that, exactly, but Salles wants us to know that this question didn’t go unasked.
