Che

At four-plus hours and worth the investment, Steven Soderbergh’s gradually absorbing biography of the rad-chic poster boy studiously glimpses Guevara’s successful Cuban revolution and his hapless Bolivian variation thereof. Both are so recessively dramatized that you wonder sometimes whether it’s all just an elaborate scheme to test the Marxist imperative of subdued individualism against Benicio Del Toro’s inherent magnetism. This is a movie, and a performance, in which battles with asthma register as strongly as battles with armies. It’s puzzlingly brilliant that way. Two brief geography-lesson graphics are about as close as Soderbergh gets to standard biopic bombast, but his otherwise exposition-averse screenwriters Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen certainly do mind the small details, in just such a way as to deserve the big screen.