By Rene Rodriguez
Miami Herald
The Motorcycle Diaries could be subtitled Portrait of the Revolutionary as a Young Man: It's a movie about the formative years of one of the most galvanizing historical figures of the late 20th century, except that the filmmakers would rather you didn't dwell too much on the person he became. It's much easier to linger on his youthful idealism than on how that idealism eventually manifested itself. It certainly makes for a much prettier picture.
But when your subject is Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara, it is disingenuous -- if not impossible -- to separate one from the other. The movie begins in January 1952, as the 23-year-old Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his buddy Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) bid a temporary farewell to their upper-middle-class friends and family in Buenos Aires and head out on a road trip across South America to discover a continent they know only from books.
Intended to last four months, their journey stretched on for eight after their means of transportation -- Alberto's vintage motorcycle -- sputtered and died for the last time. Their journey also took on increased gravity the farther they traveled: Misadventures with flirtatious women and enterprising prostitutes gave way to encounters with impoverished peasants, indigenous Indians, exploited mine workers and a leper colony where the sick were isolated from the healthy by a stretch of the Amazon they were not allowed to cross.
By recounting the pair's trip, director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera (who based the script on separate journals written by Guevara and Granado) want to show how the social and economic disparities in South America -- disparities that continue today -- led the asthmatic, naive Guevara to open his eyes to the world around him.
Uninformed viewers who walk into The Motorcycle Diaries hoping to learn something about the mysterious figure whose iconic face graces T-shirts and backpacks will come out thinking he was a kind, soulful, quiet man who rescued stray puppies from the side of the road, didn't hesitate to fork over the only money in his pocket to a destitute couple who needed it more than he did, and risked his life to swim across a river as a symbolic gesture of acceptance.
None of this may be factually inaccurate. But it's also, as the saying goes, only half the story. The Motorcycle Diaries eagerly embraces the cult of Che: It's a romanticized, pastoral vision of Guevara, or at least the hope that Guevara symbolized for many people. But there's nothing in the talented Bernal's performance to hint at the tremendous fire and anger that, while maybe not yet manifested, still had to lurk within. The most defiant thing Guevara does in the entire picture, aside from the aforementioned swim, is throw a rock at a truck.
The filmmakers' inordinate timidity toward their protagonist (who were they afraid to offend?), combined with the film's slow pace (you'll know just what it felt like to be on the road for that long), renders The Motorcycle Diaries a dull, unsatisfying experience -- as well as inconclusive. Late in the film, when a transformed Ernesto declares ''I am not me anymore,'' you want to ask him ''So who are you, exactly?'' The movie certainly doesn't know.