A decent enough ride...

Before today's debilitating back spasm kicked in, I checked out the pretty good but simplistic story of Che Guevara before he became Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries.

I know almost nothing of Che Guevara - whom we meet as Ernesto Guevara, nearly finished medical student. Probably couldn't have told you in which country he made his big mark or even what his political background really was. I recognized the iconic picture from dozens of posters and t-shirts, but that's about it.

From this movie, however, I learned that he was a brutally honest man who set out on an 8000 km journey across South America on which he found himself becoming more sympathetic to the plight of the indigenous people who were being subjugated to the more affluent Spanish and Portugeuse wealthy class. And he had a good, funny friend who went with him for the journey. That's about it. It's a simple film...pretty, fairly light-hearted for the most part, and simple. And it's been getting pretty good reviews.

But apparently, there's a lot more to the story than what we see in the film. Taken strictly as a travelogue, the film is pretty and well filmed, showing nice imagry of simpler people contrasted (a little heavy-handedly at times) with the decadence of more modern, more civilized people of Latin America. The two lead actors are both very personable, something referenced frequently in most reviews.

What we don't get, however, is much depth of character. This isn't a road movie in which the two leads get into a string of wacky, quick adventures with some thread to tie them all together - there's too much depth in some scenes for that. This isn't a buddy film in which a relationship between two friends is explored - the two don't relate so much as (the closing credits tell us) they happen to be two lives travelling parallel paths for a while. It's not a philosophical movie - there's not actually much talking about the injustices that are hinted at, rather we get lots of silent brooding and quiet contemplation over effective imagry. It's a bit of all that but not enough of any of them to make a great film. It's a good one, but it's not as great as some reviewers have made it out to be.

As Roger Ebert writes, this movie "belongs to the dead-end literary genre in which youthful adventures are described, and then "...that young man grew up to be (Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, Rod Stewart, etc)."" If the main character didn't grow up to be someone famous, this movie wouldn't exist. The story isn't that great. It's okay, it's fun to ride along for a while, but it's not great.

And clearly, it doesn't show all the sides of the man who would go on to become Che. Many folks view him as a brutal, hardline communist, not as the caring, brutally honest man we meet in this film. The truth is, as it often is, complicated. Find out something for yourself. I plan to, and if the movie prompts at least that, it's done some good.