Long-winded narratives tend to have limited appeal. Drifting around the main turf of the Toronto International Film Festival (the Cineplex Odeon theater on the top floor of a downtown mall), one heard the laments of tired volunteers, press and industry alike about the hefty screening of Steven Soderbergh’s Che slated for 9:30 a.m. Nobody was worried about the content of this detailed biopic, the ferocity conveyed by Benicio del Toro in the title role, or Soderbergh’s ability to direct the story with a mature, steady vision. Rather, most qualms involved the fact that Che runs a whopping 262 minutes, which is pretty much half a day of viewing time. Soderbergh envisioned the movie in two parts, not two movies, so even the rough, barely finished cut that played at the Cannes Film Festival in May screened as a single piece with one intermission. Now, the movie has snappier opening credits, but very few other additions. It continues to be something of an anomaly, given that its bloated running time isn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to see in theaters. Nevertheless, IFC Films has decided to take a chance and believe in audiences’ bravery, announcing today that they have purchased North American rights to the film. The movie will play in theaters this December for an awards-qualifying run before going into a slightly wider release in early 2009, while becoming available through IFC’s video-on-demand platform.

What’s impressive about Che has little to do with the running time, because Soderbergh himself doesn’t feel the pressure of it. The film moves at a brisk pace, rarely drags and never gets too preachy, but the filmmaker doesn’t try to make an epic out of it. Instead, we feel the strain of time as a device that evokes the duration of Che Guevara’s influence during his lifetime, much like David Fincher used the device to evoke the reign of terror caused by a serial killer in Zodiac. Che won’t appeal to people who like a lot of big explosions and very little character depth, but it’s a helluva better movie than another lengthy war drama playing at Toronto, Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna. Lee’s noble attempt to create a World War II drama with African American soldiers fails to create a compelling narrative, marred as it is by forced melodrama and a shoddy screenplay that sounds like some kind of second rate pulp novel from the fifties. The director undoubtedly qualifies as one of the finest American filmmakers of the last thirty years, but he might work better on his home turf.

Anna begins in the early eighties, when a black war veteran gets arrested for shooting a patron at the bank where he works. Questions surrounding his mysterious motives prompt a flashback to the forties, where the soldier and his battalion wind up stranded in Italy and cultivate a relationship with the locals. The story itself has an innate appeal, with a great enigmatic hook, but Lee’s sloppy attempts to emulate classic WWII narratives frequently fall apart. He uses a blaring trumpet score and choreographs choppy shootouts, hopelessly insisting on tired genre tropes even as he tries to subvert them. The cheesy dialogue doesn’t help. When a Nazi woman tries to turn black soldiers against their country by telling them that the United States treats African Americans like slaves, one soldier moans, “that goddamn woman is going to start a race riot.” When the main character watches a John Wayne war movie in the opening scene, he sighs, “We fought for our country, too.” With obvious lines like these, Lee might want to bring change to the evolution of the war film, but he could learn a thing or two from Che about how to stage a revolution.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Toronto Film Festival 2008, Eric, Reviews, Festivals, News, Look! New!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.