On The Road.("The Motorcycle Diaries")(Movie Review)

Byline: Mac Margolis

Walter Salles has won a deserved reputation for making compassionate films. No matter how blighted their lives, his protagonists--the orphan who finds his lost family in "Central Station," the marked son who flees a murderous vendetta in "Broken April"--usually get a second chance. In "The Motorcycle Diaries," opening widely this fall, Salles bestows his blessings on the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevara.

The movie, based on Guevara's diaries, tells of the motorcycle trip the then 23-year-old medical student--played magnificently by Gael Garcia Bernal--and a friend took through South America in 1952. The scenic eight-month journey, from the Andes to the Amazon forest, is also a rite of passage from fuzzy, postadolescent ingenuousness to the first rumblings of political awareness.

Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera build an intimate and powerful narrative that in clumsier hands could easily have turned schmaltzy or stridently political. This makes for a moving tale, but also a deceptive one. It is Che the hardened guerrilla--not the blinking Ernesto--who is Latin America's most enduring ghost. Although he died 37 years ago, Che's visage looms larger than ever, silk-screened on T shirts or glowering from ...