The Motorcyle Diaries Film Review
Why Even a Biopic Requires a Good Script
The 2004 film The Motorcyle Diaries is an adaptation of Che Guevara's influential book of the same name, but it fails in some fundamental aspects to create a good movie.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
If movie formulas were as complex as the ones in math classes, their beauty could be a bit more appreciated. But what passes for elegance and eloquence in mathematics becomes tripe in the world of art, a predictably banal experience.
What saves The Motorcycle Diaries from the banal, if not the predictable, is the strength of the acting.
The story itself is based upon the famous autobiographical book of the same name by Ernesto Guevara, better known today as Che Guevara, the man in the iconic monochromatic photo with the determined, faraway look and the star emblazoned on his beret. Che Guevara is a mythic figure, a divisive one, too: he was one of the key figures in the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s that resulted in Fidel Castro coming into power. In 1967, he was captured in Bolivia and executed as an insurgent trying to overthrow the government.
And herein lies the first problem with what was an otherwise very nice film: The Motorcycle Diaries is essentially a well-made love letter to a young Che. Granted, this is Che when he was still known by his real name; this is the one whose only real problem was his asthma. But, in the film, Guevara is set up not as a young man, but as a Jesus Christ in the making. When placed in the hands of director Walter Salles, he is not a medical student who goes on a trip around South America to learn about his continent; he is a hero for all humanity to emulate. This would be forgivable if the film was about a fictional character. But it's not, and so an average viewer is left to connect the dots between the man in the film and the man in real life, the celluloid demigod and the iconoclastic revolutionary.
Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna do a fantastic job at delivering a mediocre script with a sober freshness, and thus they raise the overall quality of this movie several notches. As Ernesto and Alberto, they have great chemistry. While the cinematography is breathtaking at times, this feels mostly like manipulation of the senses, an attempt to coax some oohs and aahs as the music crescendos and the characters climb the plateaus of the Andes Mountains. The exoticism of the locales plus the fact that the film is in a foreign language lend an air of grace and subliminal transcendence that would be lost if this was played before a Spanish-speaking audience; in much the same way, an image of the Grand Canyon might not be all that powerful to Americans who've been inundated with it.
There is another very real problem with the film, purely judging it on content and form, and not on external factors. And that is the script. As well-acted as it is (and it is very well-acted), the actors cannot save this formulaic, plot-driven, and uninspiring script. More profit is made by the cinematography and the gorgeous landscapes than on the poetic and existential truth of the friendship of Ernesto and Alberto as they travel. No insights are made, no wonder revealed about these two men who are traveling together for days, weeks, and months. What they are given to work with is a predictable buddy movie, elevated slightly by its influential subject.
Walter Salles' film manages, through subtle manipulation, to create a hero out of one of the greatest (and, in many respects, admirable) villains of the 20th century. But even that hero can't save this movie.
