"At artful moments, the action pauses for portraits—not stills but wavering poses—of the people, mostly impoverished, whom Ernesto meets along the way. These are in black-and-white, and we are meant to imagine them burning, like photographic exposures, into the Guevara conscience. Are movies the best place for such edification? I know of only a handful of films that can begin to match the sober eye of Walker Evans, say, or Dorothea Lange, and the insertion of documentary rigor into something as ravishing as “The Motorcycle Diaries” smacks, I fear, of the picturesque."
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- bill 9-27-2004 12:03 am