The Motorcycle Diaries

...First, the travelers meet a Peruvian Indian worker and his wife who have been chased off their land by a monopoly and then harried by government forces for being Communists...

...We also see the brutal foreman of a mining company (backed up, no doubt, by Yanqui financing), arrogantly selecting the ill-paid crew of the day while brusquely warning the city boys off company property...

...The violence was thus beatified into the semblance of nonviolence...

...Not that Rivera and Salles don't try to do this in at least two sequences...

...Not so offensive, though just as generalizing and much lengthier, is the concluding sequence-the stay in the leper colony...

...The question lingers: we know this young man is idealistic, but how did he become Che...

...Thaf s the idea, at any rate...

...As in his previous film, Central Station, another road movie and a great one, Salles doesn't try to lyricize landscapes or fill them with portentous menace or serenity...

...Provoked by this despair, the young man will become Che and try to give all the wretched of the earth a chance to enjoy life, not merely endure it...

...Ernesto throws a stone at a company truck but one stone doth not a Che make...

...More crucially, neither is the beginning of Ernesto's revolutionary commitment...

...Scriptwriter Jose Rivera and director Walter Salles create interesting characters and maintain a beautiful naturalness of pace and rhythm: the movie zips along while never becoming frenetic...

...his guerrilla regalia inspired the sartorial style of the Black Panthers and the Sym-bianese Liberation Army, and his theories and pronunciamientos were on the lips of members of the S.D.S...

...The movie runs about 110 minutes and, if quality could be quantified, this would be a rave review because I found at least eighty minutes of Diaries to be sinewy, savory, memorable...

...I found the entire sequence, brief as it is, pat and patronizing...

...Based on writings by Guevara and his pal, Alberto Granado, Diaries is a "road movie," a narrative that shows the mind changing while the body journeys...

...The machine gives up but the young men do not...

...No matter what we have read by or about Guevara or Granado, their characterizations in this movie suggest a variation on that archetypal pairing that looms over all Hispanic literature and drama: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza...

...The Motorcycle Diaries tries to certify the canonization of Che by dramatizing the beginnings of Ernesto's love for the masses...

...Instead, we get rather reverent close-ups of the worker's noble, stoic face, his prominent cheekbones and leathery skin, a certification of proletarian saintliness...

...Che was canonized by left-wingers in the late 1960s...

...Alberto is fat (well, he's supposed to be, though Rodrigo de la Serna is a bit on the thin side for the part), earthy, sometimes manipulative, determined to survive the world...

...This movie is anything but iconoclastic...

...She communicates her vision of the world as nothing but a vale of tears...

...His camera simply follows his heroes into progressively wilder locations, never smacking us in the face with travelogue wonderments...

...We remain detached enough to look around us just as the two friends look around, not with amazement but with intelligent curiosity, a curiosity that might ripen into insight...

...To be fair, there is a superbly directed scene near the conclusion in which Ernesto rebels against the frailty of his body by swimming across a dangerous stream, but the determination this shows could have been channeled toward many different sorts of futures (as a doctor ministering to the poor, for instance...

...One saw posters of him on dormitory walls and his writings were everywhere in campus bookstores...

...And, no matter what incident from the Guevara/Granada writings they chose to demonstrate the conversion, it would have to be shown in a misty, hallowing light in order to maintain the saintly aura that has always coated the image of Che on both the North and South American continents...

...But the dialogue is too brief, too flat, and too vague to adumbrate a conversion...

...But it's hard to ride a motorcycle while wearing a straightjacket, and the one Rivera and Salles share is made of left-wing piety...

...And around the bend lies a pothole called "Che...

...Ernesto is thin, dreamy, idealistic, candid, yearning to rescue the world...

...But the scene, intended to nail down Guevara's emotional growth, is the one in which a young female patient and Ernesto form a bond...

...This is what I meant when I wrote of this movie's doom...

...Whose insights...

...For Che Guevara is what the medical student Ernesto became: a revolutionary ready to kill for the Marxist revolution-the successful one in Cuba, and the unsuccessful one in Bolivia-that led to his execution by the Bolivian police (probably abetted by the CIA...

...an elderly doctor, saintly in manner and deed, but spurred by literary pretensions, has his illusion punctured by Ernesto's withering critique of his novel, wilts, then responds with admiration for the youth's candor...

...But, though The Motorcycle Diaries may not be an adequate portrait of a real person's conversion, it is a diverting and humane picaro adventure story...

...Sooner or later, the filmmakers would have to show what ignited the "Che" within Ernesto...

...The actual dialogue of the scene renders it a cliche encounter between the salt of the earth and the hopes of the future...

...The overall performance of Gael Garcia Bernal as Ernesto is excellent (as is de la Serna's as his pal), but the script keeps him at the surface of still water and we seldom see the running deep...

...We receive a sketchy overview of how the colony works as a hospital and social unit, and there are some nice details and incidents here...

...In Cervantes's classic, Sancho gets sucked into Don Q's dream, and Cervantes fully accounts for this change in attitude...

...Ernesto is just as idealistic at the end of the movie as at the beginning, but he is no closer to becoming a Che, and the engendering of Che is surely the raison d'etre of this film...

...Guevara, a twenty-four-year-old medical student, and Granado, a twenty-nine-year-old biochemist, share a decrepit motorcycle on a 1952 trip from Argentina to Venezuela, passing through Chile, Peru, and (briefly) Colombia...

...He knows that his protagonists are gradually adjusting to the changes in landscape, so he lets us adjust as well...

...Ernesto, a wretched dancer, tries to respond to the enticement of a mechanic's seductive wife but only infuriates her with his dopey horni-ness...

...a courteous, almost dainty landowner (beautifully acted) is suddenly panicked into truculence when Ernesto diagnoses the lump in the man's neck as a tumor...

...As if that weren't enough, the encounter is followed by a photomontage of all the other saintly workers and farmers in the area, and these stills are all in black-and-white, as if the elimination of color guaranteed purity...

...Finally, the friends decide to return to their responsibilities in Argentina, but an epilogue reminds us of Guevara's famous fate and Alberto's less-famous but longer-lasting career as an important medical administrator in Castro's Cuba...

...Moving through mountainous, watery, parched, and snowy landscapes, they meet many people, try to make out with any attractive female who seems willing (though Alberto is much more of a satyr than Ernesto), deal with their own exhaustion and illnesses (Ernesto has severe asthma and at one point almost dies), see many sights, including Machu Picchu, and wind up at a Peruvian leper colony where their medical skills are gratefully accepted by both staff and patients...

...Several scenes haunt: a Chilean girl, impressed by the big-city boys, arches her eyebrows teasingly while treating these penniless tourists to a meal...

...SCREEN Richard Alleva EASY RIDERS 'The Motorcycle Diaries' The Motorcycle Diaries is about a sensitive, intelligent, and doomed youth named Ernesto Guevara, and the movie itself is sensitive, intelligent, and doomed...

...What insights...

...In this movie, Alberto winds up as idealistic as Ernesto but the shift is never crystallized by a specific dramatic action...

...And there are at least a score of scenes and moments as memorable as these, the bounty of director Salles's talent for casting the right faces and eliciting spontaneous emotions within cannily selected locations...

...I suppose it was generally felt that while a Castro or a Peron wallowed in the power he had seized, Che would never stop seeking to be a servant of the People...

...It was logical enough that revolutionaries espousing violence would have a Marxist jungle fighter as a hero, yet there was one peculiar thing about the postmortem aura bestowed on Guevara by his admirers...

...While the posters displayed an armed warrior, and the books and aphorisms proclaimed and justified violence, his fans spoke of Che as if he were a martyr of nonviolence, a Martin Luther King, a Gandhi...

...This scene might have worked if we (and the youths) could be given some insight into why the Indian chose communism as the route to justice...