The Motorcycle Diaries

HJ Links
—Review by Darrel Manson
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf file
—Spiritual Connections

I wonder on how many college dorm walls the poster of Che Guevara has hung. For my generation, at least, Che was the epitome of the ideal of revolution. Even after death, Che continued to inspire those who wanted to change the world --whether by violent or non-violent means.

Before there was a Che Guevara, there was Ernesto Guevara, a medical student from a middle-class Argentinean family. With a semester to go before graduation, Ernesto, like many students have done before and since, took some time off to travel and see the world. Along with his friend Alberto Granado, Ernesto traveled the length of South America. Along the way, they met people from all walks of life. They saw things that were outside the comfortable lives they had lived.

The Motorcycle Diaries is based on this trip and the accounts that Guevara and Granado later wrote about the trip.

Road movies, as a genre, are especially suited for showing the influences that transform a person. This trip certainly had a formative influence on the young Guevara. He begins to see injustice and suffering that were fairly unknown to him. Certainly he grows as a person though the journey and through the film. But even by the end of the film, he is not yet the Che who has now become mythic.

That is because the film is, for the most part, apolitical. It doesn't expect the viewer to experience the same things Ernesto did. Rather we are invited to observe him as he experiences them. As we observe Ernesto, we begin to see, not what made him what he was, but a bit of the humanity that goes into who he becomes. One of the strengths of the film is that we are pulled into the lives of Ernesto and Alberto without any judgments. We are interested in them as people --for who they are at that point, not who they become.

The key quality we discover in Ernesto is compassion. He cares for an injured dog, for indigenous people displaced from the land, for exploited miners. Ernesto and Alberto spend a time at a leper colony helping provide medical care (remember, Ernesto was soon to be a doctor.) At the leper colony his compassion begins to create small revolutions: not wearing gloves like the nuns require even though they are medically not needed, setting up a soccer game with the patients.

One of the most quoted statements by Che is “The true revolutionary is
guided by great feelings of love.� In this film we see the beginnings
of those feelings in Ernesto.

Such a journey by a young man who would become such a mythological figure also invites us to think about what things form and transform us. Is it that, because of where they went, Ernesto and Alberto saw things that we don't see? Or are such things all around us waiting to be seen? Sometimes the journey only shows us what we have gotten used to ignoring. Surely such injustice and need could have been found in Guevara’s home of Buenos Aires, but by seeking life on their trip, they discovered a new world.

It is interesting that the qualities that transformed Ernesto into the Communist revolutionary Che are so similar to the qualities that can also transform us into servants of Christ. Those “great feelings of love� can be just as transformative in our lives as they were in the life of Ernesto Guevara, but to a higher purpose.