The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) Review
8/10
A twenty-three-year-old asthmatic medical student and his older friend leave Buenos Aires on a 1939 Norton with a plan to cross the continent. The bike fails repeatedly and then permanently. They keep going on foot, by truck and by raft.
The 8 is for a film that refuses the biography it could have made. There is no speech, no rifle, no beret and no moment where the audience is told who this man will become. It is a road film about two friends and a continent.
What holds it below a 9 is a certain smoothness. The photography is beautiful, the tone is warm, and several encounters that should be harder are softened by a score that tells you how to feel about them.
It Stops Before the Story Everybody Knows
The film covers eight months in 1952 and ends when the journey does. Guevara returns home, finishes his degree, and the picture closes with a note about what happened later.
That is the central decision and it is the right one. A biography would have to make every scene a foreshadowing, which converts a young man into a set of clues, and nobody behaves like a clue.
Instead the film gives him small reactions that accumulate. He gives away money he cannot spare, he tells an uncomfortable truth to somebody who fed him, he swims a river at night because a promise was involved. None of them is presented as significant.
Gael Garcia Bernal plays somebody who is not yet anything. Polite, awkward with women, physically frail, honest to the point of rudeness, and visibly working out what he thinks about each thing as it happens.
The asthma is the physical detail the film keeps returning to and never comments on. He is short of breath at altitude, has to stop, needs an inhaler he cannot always get, and the journey is harder for him than for anybody else in every single scene.
When your subject has a famous later life, the discipline is to stop before it and refuse every wink. Foreshadowing a known outcome turns the character into an illustration of themselves.
The alternative is accumulation. Small consistent behaviours across a long stretch do the work, and the reader assembles the person without being told what the person becomes.
Test it by removing the epilogue. If your story only means something because of what the reader already knows happened afterward, you have written a footnote to history instead of a story.
The Friendship Carries It
Alberto Granado is twenty-nine, a biochemist, a liar, and considerably better company than his friend, and Rodrigo de la Serna plays him as the engine of the whole trip.
The comedy is all his. He invents credentials, exaggerates their reputation, borrows money he will not repay, and pursues every woman they meet with complete confidence and no success.
What makes the pairing work is that they are genuinely different people instead of a hero and a sidekick. Alberto wants a good time and a job at the end of it. Ernesto keeps noticing things that spoil his own good time.
The letter-writing device is used sparingly and well. Both men write home, and the gap between what they report and what the audience has seen is a small running joke that turns serious exactly once.
De la Serna was a relative unknown and holds the screen against a much bigger star, which the film needs. If Alberto reads as a supporting player the trip becomes a solo journey with a companion attached, and the whole structure depends on two people who could each have been the protagonist.
The Landscape Is the Argument
They cross Argentina, Chile, the Atacama, Peru and the Amazon, and the film photographs each as a different country instead of as scenery.
Eric Gautier shot much of it on location with a small unit, and the changes in altitude, temperature and color are doing the film’s political work. The Andes are beautiful and the people living in them are being displaced from land they worked.
The mine sequence is where the film stops being a travelogue. A couple walking to a copper mine because they have nothing, waiting overnight with dozens of others to be selected for work, and the foreman picking men by pointing.
The couple tell their story around a fire and the film gives them the scene without interruption. The two students have nothing useful to say, offer what money they have, and the film is honest that the gesture is worth almost nothing to anybody involved, which is a considerably harder note to hold than a scene about generosity being rewarded would have been for anybody involved to write or to shoot.
Machu Picchu is the other turn and it is handled without any speech at all. Two young men sitting in a ruined city built by people who were destroyed, looking down, and the film lets them sit there.
The one line it permits itself afterward is about how a civilization capable of building that was replaced by one capable of building Lima, and it is delivered as an observation between friends instead of as a thesis. The film earns it because it has spent ninety minutes showing instead of arguing.
Political material lands when it arrives as something witnessed instead of something argued. Nobody in this film explains inequality. The audience watches a man point at other men.
The rule is that the protagonist should be a witness before he is a participant, and should not have a position yet. A character who already knows what he thinks turns every encounter into confirmation.
Place the turn in a scene with no dialogue if you can. The reader supplies the conclusion, and conclusions readers reach themselves are the ones that stay.
The Leper Colony
The last third takes them to San Pablo, a colony on the Amazon where patients live on one bank and staff on the other, separated by the river.
That geography is the film’s best found image, and it is historically true instead of invented. Doctors cross by boat each day, wear gloves, and return at night to the side where the healthy people are.
Guevara refuses the gloves. It is presented as a small matter of manners instead of a gesture, which is why it works, and the patients register it immediately.
The birthday swim is the film’s climax and it is a river crossing. He swims to the patients’ side at night, asthmatic, against the current, because he said he would, and the sequence is filmed as an ordeal instead of as a triumph.
Everything the film has built is in that one action. A physical division that everybody has accepted, a man who finds it intolerable, and a gesture that changes nothing administratively and is understood completely by both banks.
The patients are played largely by people from the region, and several sequences were shot at working facilities, which gives those scenes a texture that casting could not have produced.
What It Declines to Do
Around fifty-seven million dollars worldwide, an Academy Award for Jorge Drexler’s song, and a reception that split along entirely predictable lines about its subject.
The complaint that it romanticizes a man who later did terrible things is a real one and the film has a defense. It is about somebody who has not yet done any of it, and a story about a twenty-three-year-old is not required to carry a verdict on the forty-year-old.
What the film can be faulted for is softness. The score swells at moments that would be stronger dry, the encounters with poverty are shot beautifully, and beauty is an argument whether or not you intend it.
The closing device is the best answer to all of it. Photographs of the real people they met, taken during the journey, and a brief note on Alberto Granado, who was alive when the film was made and lived to see it.
Those photographs also do something the film could not do for itself. Every face in them is a person who was standing in front of two students in 1952, and the montage converts a beautifully shot road movie back into a record of an actual journey through actual poverty.
A story about somebody’s early life is not obliged to argue about their later one, and works that try to do both usually fail at each.
The honest position is to declare the frame. This film states its span in the first minute and closes it in the last, which is an author telling the reader exactly what is and is not on offer.
Be careful about beauty. Photographing hardship well is a choice with a meaning attached, and if your prose becomes most lyrical when describing suffering, the reader will notice what you find aesthetic.
Should you watch The Motorcycle Diaries?
Yes, and watch it as a road film instead of as a biography. Two friends, a failing motorcycle and a continent, with a protagonist who has not yet decided anything, and a film disciplined enough to stop before he does.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists