HEADLINES:
R/€ 
R/£ More history than portrait
November 28, 2009 Edition 1
Che: Part One
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Elvira Minguez
Reviewer: Anthony Quinn
FFFGG
The first part of Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic is necessarily an inconclusive experience, a means of laying the foundations on which the legend of Ernesto "Che" Guevara would be built.
In fact, this film plays not so much as a portrait of the man as a history of the Cuban Revolution, beginning in a Mexico City flat with the momentous encounter between Fidel Castro and Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), an Argentinian doctor with idealism in his blood.
The two men, united in their goal to overthrow the corrupt (and US-backed) dictatorship of Batista, lead a guerrilla mission into Cuba in November 1956, and the struggle for the island's soul begins.
Del Toro, shrewd and saturnine, plays Che in a surprisingly low key, an asthmatic who knows how to conduct an insurgency yet shows only brief glimmers of the charisma for which he was to become famous.
Soderbergh, working from a script by Peter Buchman, cuts between the jungle fighting in Cuba and Che's appearance in New York for a UN conference in 1964, by which time he is feted as one of the revolution's architects. This latter section is filmed in black-and-white, a possible signpost to the second part that will sort out the man from the myth.
As it stands, part one feels slightly plodding; its one-thing-after-another format may be true to the way things happened, but it lends the film no satisfactory shape or intricacy.
For all the drama that surrounded them, Soderbergh never gets under the skin of either Che Guevara or Castro. We can only hope that the psychological dimensions will be illuminated in the next part. - The Independent
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