The paralyzing Che, a four-and-a-half-hour endurance marathon with Benicio Del Toro as legendary Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, is less a movie than an explosion of director Steven Soderbergh’s massive ego. This interminable bore catalogs two phases in the guerilla’s life. The first half, which was filmed last, covers the years from 1955, when Che and Castro joined forces to overthrow the corrupt Batista regime, to the conquering of the city of Havana, in early 1959. The second half, which was shot first, covers his adventures in Bolivia and the Belgian Congo, organizing a military force and training peasants to become a new generation of storm troopers. The film explains a few things about the enigma of Che, but you can’t survive it without a sandwich and a change of underwear, and I don’t know one person who sat through the whole thing. The wags at the TIFF dubbed it Havana’s Gate, and I can’t resist quoting one critic who declared that the whole thing could have just as easily been played by a Che T-shirt.
Caveats aside, the key word has been versatility. Actors with an eye on the Oscars battled enormous misconceptions and tackled major challenges playing against type. I am no fan of either Mickey Rourke or director Darren Aronofsky, but in a grim movie called The Wrestler, they have collaborated to create a devastatingly disturbing portrait of an over-the-hill fighter hanging onto the shards of a shattered life with steroids, mayhem in front of crowds screaming for blood, and the sad vestiges of broken relationships with an estranged daughter (Rachel Evan Wood) and a tortured stripper (Marisa Tomei). The film grafts the skin of a new career onto the battered face and body of Mickey Rourke. In Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s magnificent canvas of dysfunctional family life in Stamford, Conn., Anne Hathaway strips away the gorgeous all-American-girl beauty she displayed in The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada and bares the scar tissue of an emotionally wrung-out drug addict released from rehab in time to wreck her sister’s weekend wedding. With its colorful characters, sensational cast, brilliant screenplay by the fresh, talented Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of the great Lena Horne), and overlapping dialogue, it is Mr. Demme’s homage to Robert Altman, only better because you can hear every word and don’t want to miss a heartbeat. If the programmers for the forthcoming New York Film Festival had any taste or brains, they would have selected this American masterpiece instead of A Christmas Tale, the French take on a similar subject with a matronly Catherine Deneuve as the matriarch of a family of mental defectives who is dying from a rare cancer that requires a bone marrow transfusion. Rachel Getting Married is vastly superior filmmaking in about a million ways. I’ll share more detailed enthusiasms for its U.S. release in a few weeks.
“Viggo!” “We want Viggo!” In contrast to the prancing egos on display at the TIFF, the undisputed hero this year has been charismatic, versatile and totally charming Viggo Mortensen, who’s enthralled in two distinctively contrasting performances. In the revisionist western Appaloosa, directed by Ed Harris, he is a leathery deputy marshal in a lawless stretch of New Mexico in 1888. But in the electrifying German-British co-production Good, my favorite film of the festival, even this mesmerizing chameleon, who has proved he can play anything, surprised the hell out of audiences, who emerged stunned. Set in the dusky shadows of 1938 Berlin, he plays a shy, nerdy professor of literature who writes a novel about euthanasia that attracts the rat-eyed attention of Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, all of them hungry to recruit talented intellectuals with admirable reputations to give a veneer of false respectability to the social reforms of the Reich. Flattered, the innocent and apolitical professor finds himself slowly seduced into a political machine he neither understands nor has any interest in, until his best friend, a Jewish psychiatrist (also played against type by the terrific Jason Isaacs, who usually plays villains), shows him firsthand the cruelties his fellow privileged Germans are capable of. “I don’t even go to the office,” protests this “good German,” but by the time he is shaken from his complacency by a visit to the “camps,” the movie has left him—and everyone who sees it—wrenched. Fabulous movie, haunting performance, and Viggo was everywhere doing PR chores to give it the promotion it deserves—shaking hands, helping one fan repair his camera for the best angle, smiling widely at all and sundry, and charming a jaded festival out of its socks.
Renowned for idiotic questions, the press conferences are always worth avoiding, but the one with Viggo earned applause, as he was a good sport and demonstrated his rarely seen sense of humor. One jerk, referring to his roles as cowboys and as the full-frontal-nude Russian spy in the brutal sauna scene in last year’s Eastern Promises, asked, “Which is harder—appearing stark naked or carrying a six-gun?” Viggo’s trademark sex smolder faded, and bursting into a shit-kicking grin and without missing a beat, he shot back: “I would say appearing stark naked while wearing a six-gun.”
I’ll have what he’s having.
rreed@observer.com
