Motorcycle Diaries, The

Directed by Walter Salles

Written by Ché Guevara (book), Alberto Granado (book) and Jose Rivera (screenplay)

Starring:  Gael García Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna

Rated R for language

128 minutes runtime

USA Release Date: September 2004

Rating (out of 5 stars): **** 1/2

How little most of us know about Che Guevara, considering the status of the revolutionary icon as one of the most familiar figures in the world.  We don’t even need to see his facial features; the silhouette of his head with arm raised high is enough.  But the fame of the hero of the revolution masked his true identity from many, and this film has come to the rescue to show what really made the man.

The film is about a motorcycle trip Che made with his friend Alberto Granado through much of South America in 1952 when they were 23 years old and heading for their medical residency at a leper colony in Peru.  The trip was apparently the first time Che had been far away from home, at least completely on his own, and was his defining epiphany.

The trip itself is fascinating in the territory it covers.  The two students, traverse pastures, high desert and snow capped peaks.  They do the things that only college students do, with the audacity and daring of youth.  Their ability to get themselves into nearly fatal situations and come out laughing is remarkable.  They fight and quarrel like the children they are and exchange jabs and insults while compromising their way through their trip.  Che helps Alberto push his motorcycle when it breaks down, and Alberto saves Che’s life with an adrenalin injection when he is going into asthmatic shock.  Che rams the motorcycle into a cow; Alberto runs the bike off the road.  Everything happens that can possibly happen.  Alberto’s vaguely insulting nickname for Che-“Fuser” says it all.  The way he says it sounds like “Hoser!”

Walter Salles direction of Bernal and De la Serna is wonderful.  He has managed to package all that is crazy, daring, courageous and stupid about youth at the same time.  After all, there was a time in all of our lives when we, too, thought we could conquer the world.  Or at least see it for free on a motorcycle that was either broken or breaking in a hundred places.

The pivotal moments in this film are two: the first at the Anaconda Copper mine in Chile and the second at a leper colony in Peru.  At the first occasion, Guevara witnessed the inhuman treatment of the mine workers.  In a scene reminiscent of the American depression, the workers gather at the work site, starving, without water or sanitation facilities.  Some are chosen and the rest are turned away to starve.  This is a powerful scenario; one that left its mark on many Americans.  And it left its mark on Che.

The second crucial sequence in the film is Che and Alberto’s experience in the leper colony.  There are some people who can pass through a setting like that unchanged.  Che could not.  When informed that the nuns who ran the colony demanded that all non-patients wear gloves, even though they were well aware that leprosy is not contagious through touch, Che refused.  The rubber gloves were a symbol that, perhaps, even the nuns didn’t fully comprehend.  It was condescending and humiliating and condemned the patients to a second-class status that they had done nothing to deserve.  It was reminiscent of some sort of curse, or original sin that the nuns automatically accepted as a reality of life, but which Che immediately rejected from his heart.  When the nuns refuse to feed Che because he didn’t follow the glove rule, the patients steal meals and bring them to him in a beautiful act of rebellion.

Later, during his going-away party, Che decides he will spend his birthday morning “across the river,” in the patient compound, instead of in the staff compound.  Risking his life in the Amazon river’s swift currents, he leaves his own party to swim the river and join the patients on the other side.  As he was asthmatic, this activity almost cost him his life; but he survived to write the story.  His toast at the party is prophetic: a pledge for a united nation of Mestizos, from the tip of Argentina to Mexico.

“The Inca’s had astronomy, mathematics and brains, but the Spanish had gunpowder,” Che says when pondering Inca ruins.  He may have known that before, but one gets the impression that his seeing the ruins was pivotal.  He understood from that point on that violence has its place in any society, no matter how advanced.  What makes a revolutionary?  What makes a man or woman care enough about a cause to risk their life for it?  This is the stuff of which heroes are made.

An excellently directed and produced film, the movie captures the essence of youth with an honesty and reality that takes us back to those days when we lived for the moment and soaked up the world like a sponge.  No question was too painful to ask and no goal to impossible to reach.  Broken down motorcycles were our steeds as we raced across the planet, speaking our minds and tempting fate.  Some of us didn’t make it.  We died on those motorcycles and at those deserted third-world border crossings and check points.  But those of who survived, and most of us did, found a truth that will not be denied.  Once you see it you never forget it, and Che never did.

When the trip ends in Venezuela, Che is changed forever, as we all were at the end of our particular journeys.  In 1959 Che went to Cuba and was instrumental in the revolution that overthrew Batista, and American interests there.  He was assassinated in 1967 while engaged in revolutionary activities.  His lifetime friend Alberto Granado and Grenado’s wife still live in Cuba.