Word: che
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...faves like the Dardenne brothers and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (which, you have to admit, is a great name) - to Hollywood gigantism from the Indiana Jones team. The Riviera fortnight has been so stodgy that we almost welcomed a wild, four-and-a-half hour misfire like Steven Soderbergh's Che. But now our (my) patience has been rewarded, our (my) biliousness calmed. One good movie can do that. In 2006, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth showed up on the last day, to prove there was life in the old medium yet. This year the savior is Charlie Kaufman...
...what we do know. On Sunday evening, at 7:30 Cannes time, Jury President Sean Penn will start announcing these awards: the Palme d'Or (best picture), a Grand Jury Prize (runner-up), Jury Prize (honorable mention), Best Director (usually a consolation prize), Screenplay, Actor, Actress. Steven Soderbergh's Che is getting Palme d'Or buzz. So is Clint Eastwood,s Changeling. Other films being talked up are the Israeli docu-animation Waltz With Bashir, the French family drama A Christmas Tale and the Belgian The Silence of Lorna, from two-time Palme d'Or laureates Jean-Pierre...
...real brain behind the operation. Big deal. ... When we aren't getting newsreels, we're getting routine footage of guerrilla clashes in the jungle. ... All this movie inspires toward the Cuban Revolution is excruciating boredom..." He wrote this in 1969, in a review of the flop Hollywood bio-pic Che!, with the not-very-Latin Omar Sharif as Guevara. Yet most of Ebert's denunciations apply to Soderbergh's movie, which dispenses with the exclamation point - and, in fact, with almost all of the compelling, sometimes contradictory drama in Guevara's life...
Occasionally, the film is enlivened by the guest appearances of familiar actors, sometimes cast appropriately (Lou Diamond Phillips as Mario Monje, Catalina Sandina Moreno as Che's second wife), sometimes not (Matt Damon as a negotiator in Bolivia!?). But the major burden falls on its star, who as one of the producers has nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro - whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof - is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one thrilling confrontation...
...enunciate - that the most important quality of a revolutionary is "love," and that he's not a Catholic but "I believe in mankind" - and partly because so little information is vouchsafed about his non-jungle career or his private life. (You're about 100 mins, into Part One before Che mentions in passing that he has a wife and child back home.) Halfway through the film he has lost much of the power and poignancy you might expect of such a character, and by the end he's relinquished all our interest. After all that time spent with the revolutionary...