Che's Way.(Steven Soderbergh film, "Che" )

The new Steven Soderbergh film, "Che," begins with a pair of boots. More than four hours later, that is pretty much how it ends, too. The first boots belong to Che Guevara (Benicio Del Toro), who is wearing them, together with his trademark combat fatigues, while being interviewed in Havana, in 1964. He wears the same outfit later that year, in New York, as a way of indicating, to the United Nations and to any bien-pensants who can gaze at him without drooling, that even in this city of chatter he remains an undaunted man of action. The second pair of boots, by contrast, is the last thing he sees, as he dies on the floor of a Bolivian hut; they belong to the officer who has come to check that Che, caught and shot, has finally given up his troublesome ghost. The visual echo is a fitting one, since, whatever the private impulses that fired this work, there is no doubting Soderbergh's desire to shoot at ground level--not to linger on the loftiness of political ideals but, instead, to get down amid the dirt, sweat, and despair of putting them into practice.

The movie is actually two movies, excitingly titled "Part One" and "Part Two." They had a brief run at the tail end of last year, to qualify for Oscar nominations; now, at their leisure, they are enjoying a wider release, and, for that full revolutionary flavor, I would recommend seeing them back to back, with a pit stop for a mojito in between. As to whether we really need two movies, well, Eisenstein used the same scheme for "Ivan the Terrible" (there was a third, which he barely started), and it seems only fair that Che the Implacable, who packed a good deal into less than forty years on earth, should receive a similar treatment. Mind you, anybody who goes to a double bill of "Che" expecting a handsome survey of his life, as I did, will be surprised by what's not there. Nothing about the budding of his radical beliefs, which was rather too lovingly captured by Walter Salles in "The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004), starring Gael Garcia Bernal as an improbably gorgeous Che. Nothing of the rebels' entry into Havana, in early 1959, with Che at their head and Batista, the cowardly tyrant, already fled; "Che, Part One," teasingly, is a triumphus interruptus, halting just short of this spasm of joy. Nothing of Che's own tyrannical tendencies, as witnessed by the hundreds executed under his auspices during the revolutionary tribunals, or of his calamitous period as president of Cuba's National Bank. And only a whisper of his entanglement in the Congo, in 1965, which he himself described as "a failure," and which somebody--Werner Herzog, perhaps--might care to dramatize in a future film, although its Conradian futility might be hard to take.

So what are we left with? Two separate stories, in essence, with occasional trimmings. "Part One" begins by hopping across three locations in as many minutes: Cuba, in 1964; newsreel footage of Batista's seizure of power there, in 1952; and Mexico City, in 1955, when Fidel Castro first meets Che and discusses an armed overthrow of the Batista regime. After that, things settle down, and the bulk of the story, apart from occasional flash-forwards (in granular black-and-white) to the American trip, covers the training and the deployment of guerrilla forces in Cuba, where Che arrived in 1956. The guerrillas start in the Sierra Maestra mountains and wind up assaulting the town of Santa Clara, in the middle of the island, wresting it from government control. "Part Two" gives no more than a backward glance at Cuba; the opening passages flow like a spy thriller, as our hero slips from public view and enters quietly--in the guise of a bald, bespectacled badger, having shaved his beard and pate--into Bolivia, where the rest of the tale unfolds. There, in his final effort to foment revolution, he takes one nom de guerre after another; even as Che becomes Ramon, though, and as Ramon becomes Fernando, the legend of Guevara adheres ever more unmistakably to its plinth.

Throughout the films, we are given precise dates onscreen, and the writers, Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen, have clearly delved into a wealth of documentary sources; it was news to me that Che smoked an avuncular pipe as often as a sexually smoldering cigar. The over-all effect, however, is at once scrupulous and vague. We are sometimes given information that we don't require, such as the map of South America at the beginning of "Part Two," which helpfully points out places like Chile and Brazil--at best, a nod to Che's vision of the continent as one giant tinderbox, awaiting the spark of insurrection. At other, more crucial times, the information isn't there when we need it. In the second movie, for example, one of Che's lieutenants is told that his brother has been killed in battle, and the scene is ...