The Greatest Trick

Che Guevara is probably most famous as an image - the printed T-shirt of an unshaven Che looking into the distance, beret stuffed onto a mop of restless hair, inspiring the world. Whatever that might or might not inspire in you, the fact is that Guevara has become a poster-boy for the idea of revolution, even if those who wear his T-shirt these days wouldn’t think about rising up and changing the world - it’s a worthy idea. Well, before revolution became a worthy idea, Ernesto Guevara was a typical college medical student in search of fun and adventure, and with his friend Alberto Granado discovered why revolution was necessary on his continent.

Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries documents a trip Guevara and Granado took in 1951-2 from Argentina through Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela to a leper colony where they aimed to complete their medical residency. They get on the road on a most unreliable motorcycling beast looking for laughs, chicks and a bit of adventure, but soon become affected by the plight of the people around them. They pass through towns where nobody has any work, remote mountain villages which haven’t experienced any of the progress of the 20th century, and personal situations galore which affect the two men very differently. The two central performances, by Gael García Bernal as Guevara and Rodrigo De la Serna as Granada, do a great job of showing us two lives running parallel for a short time, before the need for social reform begins to affect one more than the other and lead him into the search for truth and justice for the suffering people he sees in every country they visit.

This sounds like one of those movies that falls into the ‘worthy-but-dull’ category as I describe it, but it is far from that. There is much to laugh at in the first half of the film, and while the tone may turn more serious as time goes on, it never descends into preachiness - I have a feeling that the film might not have gone down so well if the communism that Guevara ended up representing was in full force here. Instead of that, what we get is a sense of injustices being perpetrated on a people who have no idea how to combat them, and one man being awakened to that situation that he knew nothing about. In a certain montage sequence I was very much reminded of Jesus looking at the people around him ‘like sheep without a shepherd’, and Jesus’ response was compassion and love. You see the same heart response in Bernal’s performance, and his subsequent actions turned him into an inspirational leader for a large group of people. It took him a trip round a continent to find out what life was really like out there; in the present day, where information about how others in the world live is so readily available, what is it that’s stopping us doing our bit to combat social injustice, which is still very much with us? Buying fair trade products, recycling stuff or buying the Big Issue seem like a drop in the ocean when faced with governments and corporations who continue certain social injustices, but it’s a start, and it’s what we can do.

Hmm, how preachy have I got? Erm, anyway, it’s well worth a watch, but there is swearing throughout as I recall.