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 Motorcycle Diaries tries to certify the canonization of Che by dramatizing the beginnings of Ernesto’s love for the masses. The violence was thus beatified into the semblance of nonviolence.
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. 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. 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. One saw posters of him on dormitory walls and his writings were everywhere in campus bookstores his guerrilla regalia inspired the sartorial style of the Black Panthers and the Symbianese Liberation Army, and his theories and pronunciamientos were on the lips of members of the S.D.S. Che was canonized by left-wingers in the late 1960s. And around the bend lies a pothole called “Che.”įor 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). 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.
Scriptwriter José 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. The Motorcycle Diaries is about a sensitive, intelligent, and doomed youth named Ernesto Guevara, and the movie itself is sensitive, intelligent, and doomed.
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