I watched The Motorcycle Diaries the other day. (The scenery was gorgeous. So was the lead actor. Both of those sentences are extreme understatements.) The film progressed excellently from privilege to utter poverty -- in the people the two journeying friends meet, in the state of their transportation, even in the music and dancing. But it struck me as slightly ironic that it took leaving Argentina and encountering the dispossessed in Chile and Venezuela to "realize" that people are oppressed; technically oppression always existed, hidden at home, in Buenos Aires too. It's also slightly hilarious that in the film, Argentina is home to educated snobs and an unfaithful girlfriend -- and further and further away, the people are "real."
Admittedly, the Cult of Che has always irritated me somewhat. (The ironically mass-distributed icon associates the image and the person with the glamorization, never the specifics, of the word "revolution." Somehow real ideas and real people get lost when everything is emblazoned in and reduced to black and white and red. But hey, it's cool to buy a T-shirt "in solidarity" and spout vague notions about CIA plots. It's uncool to acutally know anything about the complicated histories of Cuba, the Congo, or Bolivia.)
If I ignore all this baggage I bring to the film, and approach it simply as the tale of two friends travelling up the western coast of South America, then it's good. Each community encountered, from the family in Argentina to the homeless communist couple to the leper colony, displayed a sense of love and human connection. And I appreciated the small subplot about brutal honesty being the better form of communication.
I would read the book.
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