The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) — film review

Witnesses, transformations, and ideals through road-movie scenes

The Motorcycle Diaries is a 2004 biopic directed by Walter Salles, based primarily on the written memoir of the 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara, who would later become known as the iconic revolutionary leader Che Guevara. The film recounts the 1952 expedition, initially by motorcycle, across South America by Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado. As well as being a road movie, the film is a coming-of-age film, in which Guevara and Granado discovers themselves transformed by their witnesses on the poverty and injustices on the vast continent. As a result, the trip plants the initial seed of cognitive dissonance within Guevara, who would later view armed revolution as a way to challenge the continent’s economic inequalities and political repression.

(Source: Wikipedia)

This was probably my favorite movie since this course started. It filled me with all kinds of emotion and imagination in merely two hours, taking me through the adventurous South America of the 1950’s. Actually, I read the book of The Motorcycle Diaries several years ago and liked it pretty much. (In fact, this book, along with “Cien años de soledad” became my major factors for starting to learn Spanish.) However, I think that the movie version was even better. Through the lens, I was wowed by the breathtaking road-movie scenes of South America; through Guevara and Granado’s eyes, I was deeply moved and could identify with the vast suffering of South American people; and through witnessing their grand trip, I was injected with some sorts of passion that brought me to somewhere in the very depth of my heart.
I think that this type of movie can guide us through the thoughts, motivations, and some anecdotes of historical figures, so that we can better understand him or her as a real person, not as another name in the textbook. But to be honest, this type of movie doesn’t help much in teaching people the whole context of historical facts or events. After all, this is a movie, not a history textbook.
Because having read the book, I already knew something about Che Guevara before watching this film. In my perception, he was a passionate idealist, a socialist revolutionist, and also a brutal executor at the same time. After watching this film, I further noticed that he was actually more introverted than aggressive as I assumed. However, introverted as he might had been, he was definitely a person of perseverance and a sense of justice, who would take anything necessary to achieve the “right thing”, and the “right thing” was of course defined by himself. This is evident when Granado proposed his ideal of peacefully establishing a government of justice to Guevara, but Guevara immediately refuted him by saying that a revolution without guns is just not possible.
Finally, I do think that this movie glorified Che Guevara, but I don’t think that it is what the director should’t do. After all, one can’t possibly be a total bastard or a complete saint. He was just like us, a real person with conflicting doings, and there must be more than one way to understand him. Otherwise, every figure would be so flat and everything they did would be black-and-white. The fact that he did such brutal things wouldn’t turn his originally positive motivation into negative, nor would it keep us from remembering his youthful, passionate journey. Of course it is good to know both sides of him, and to keep in mind that he was such a controversial figure leaving behind so much discussion. But we really don’t need to deny his whole life, or even a movie portraying him, only for some of his wrongdoings. Let’s be less childish, view him as a real human being, not as a black-and-white character that only exists in cartoons.

(This is an edited version of one of my film reviews from the course “Never Too Many Movies: Spanish & Catalan Society through Cinema” during my exchange at ESADE Business School in Barcelona.)