"The Motorcycle Diaries"

Lefties demanding their Che or the highway may be disappointed, but this portrayal of the mythic revolutionary resounds with minor epiphanies.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Sep 24, 2004 | If the handsome young Mexican actor Gael García Bernal goes any further into playing shy, awkward, slightly damp characters as they discover the world, somebody in Hollywood is going to have to revive the "Revenge of the Nerds" franchise. The fact that the 23-year-old character he plays in Walter Salles' new film, "The Motorcycle Diaries," would become a person of enormous political and cultural significance is interesting enough. In the context of the film, though, it doesn't matter as much as perhaps it should.

"The Motorcycle Diaries" is a paradoxical affair. How could it not be? The man whose story it tries to tell is one of the most conflicted symbols of our age. I imagine that North Americans and Latin Americans will encounter quite different "texts" -- if you'll forgive the horrible jargon -- when they watch it. On the one hand, that's a tribute to Salles and screenwriter José Rivera's delicate handing of their subject. On the other, it's a testament to the chasm between our continent -- our world, one might better say -- and theirs, which half a century of capitalism and "development" have done surprisingly little to bridge.

This is a quiet, gently good-humored and tender road movie. If it reminds you of the film that showcased Bernal's breakthrough role, Alfonso Cuarón's "Y Tu Mamá También," it's mostly by way of contrast. That was also a story of two young men in the hinterlands of Latin America, where the personal met the political. But where that film seemed to burst with color and all but explode with sexuality, this one is more detached, a fair bit cooler and a lot sadder. Even in a small town in Chile where the local girls seem bored and willing, our hero -- whose face will later emblazon the T-shirts of a million American college students -- can't get laid.

From the perspective of Hollywood movies and American literature, "The Motorcycle Diaries" feels like a familiar story of Kerouac-style rebels on the open road. It's an exotic travelogue and a fable about growing up. Sure, these guys on their 1939 Norton 500 have ideals and dreams of a better world, but they seem to belong to the "Easy Rider" tradition of individualism, iconoclasm and almost metaphysical transformation. This is the story of Che Guevara -- for that's who we're talking about -- divorced from politics and history, rendered as a young American.

For viewers from any country between the Mexican border and Tierra del Fuego, regardless of their political affiliation, "The Motorcycle Diaries" is likely to possess a different significance. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Bernal), the naive, asthmatic Argentine medical student who sets out to travel 8,000 miles of South America in the summer of 1952, is both an individual and an emblem of an entire continent's painfully emerging self-consciousness, one still not at peace five decades later. This too is a portrait of Che Guevara as a young American -- but in the broader, hemispheric sense of that word, a meaning not at all divorced from politics or history.

I suspect some leftists will lament that "The Motorcycle Diaries" isn't political enough, while some less political filmgoers may find it too sober, a bit short on the supposedly intoxicating spirit of Latin American narrative. There is a balancing act at work here that sometimes makes the film seem too careful, but I found it a lovely and supremely moving experience, a haunting symphony in a minor key if not a knock-your-socks-off masterpiece. Salles (the Brazilian director who made "Central Station" and "Behind the Sun") and his crew follow the route taken by the young Guevara and his Sancho Panza-like companion, Alberto Granado (played with élan by the Falstaffian Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna), shooting the film in sequence and almost entirely on the actual locations visited by the duo 50 years earlier. This quasi-documentary approach -- most of the extras are local townspeople, and some of the dialogue is improvised -- lends an agreeable, unforced quality to the journey.

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