phers greater control over depth of field in DV. You won’t notice anything different at first, but if you’ve spent any time watching mumblecore flicks or DV horror movies, recall how flat, shallow, and smooth edges are in the frame of those works. Medicine has the tex ture and grit of film stock. Moreover, all the color has been drained from the Medicine’s footage, resulting is an
biking and traveling scenes float through this movie, all scored to the percolating melodies of indie rock and underground producers—in fact, the soundtrack itself is a fetching mixtape of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Au Revoir Simone, White Denim, the Octopus Project, Ivana XL, Yesterday’s New Quintet, and others—and these scenes wordlessly capture the joy moving around the city you love.
A FEW TASTEFULLY EXCELLENT FILMMAKING CHOICES HELP JENKINS SUSTAIN THE MOVIE’S FINELY OBSERVED BUT UNDERSTATED MOOD. invitingly stark black and white image that lends the movie a sense of underground life and nostalgia. But it’s Cenac who really gets Medicine moving and carries it along. A The Daily Show writer and correspondent, his Micah is a born-and-raised San Francisco native who installs aquariums for a living, and he has witnessed how the city has changed even during his short life, things he notices every day as he bikes around. Clad in a T-shirt, zip-up jacket, cap, and the skinny but loose jeans with the right pants’ leg rolled up—a look favored by urban cyclists the world over—Micah’s easygoing demeanor, lowkey handsomeness, and curveball charm anchors the movie. Cenac makes Micah a confidently casual presence, able to disarm comments with a glance or single word; Cenac even gives Micah’s recurring verbal tic, an almost sleepy utterance of the word, “Cool,” so many inflections that its conversational meaning changes over the movie. When Micah looks in her wallet, finds her driver’s license and realizes that she didn’t tell him her real name, and decides to pedal back to the Marina and give it to her, it feels like a hopefully romantic gesture. A couple of
When Micah finally finds her, they slowly form a loose bond that only strengthens as the day goes on. What fol lows is less a you ng u rban romance that an understated identity exploration. Both Micah and Joanne are African-American, and while their day-long chats do include discussions of interracial dating—his ex was white, as is her current boyfriend—and what it’s like to be young and black in a city with the smallest per capita African-American population in the country, the conversation never becomes didactic or pedantic, even when they disagree. You suspect that Jenkins didn’t have to cheapen his movie’s intelligence by having condescending platitudes come out of Micah’s and Joanne’s mouths because his characters are so fully formed that they wear their contradictions, complications, and vulnerabilities everyday. Medicine for Melancholy doesn’t really conclude; like any day it merely ends—as ambiguously as it began. But you leave feeling that its titular prescription refers to the heartfelt, funny, contentious, and playful human interaction captured over the course of this single day. ■
WYATT CENAC STRUMS THE GENTRIFICATION BLUES.
CHE Directed by Steven Soderbergh OPENS MARCH 6 AT LANDMARK HARBOR EAST
WITH ITS ICONIC THREE-LETTER TITLE, more than fourhour running time, and chronicling of one of the most casually misunderstood figures of the 20th century, Steven Soderbergh’s Che redefines epic—for better and worse. Divided into two parts, Soderbergh’s monolith— which he directed, shot, and edited—doesn’t aspire to tell the whole story of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine physician, revolutionary, and guerilla fighter who has become synonymous with boilerplate countercultural leanings and whose image has been co-opted into meaningless inanity. Instead, like Michael Mann’s 2001 Ali, Soderbergh focuses on a very specific period of time, an era for which the man later became a myth. Part one splits time between the 1957-’59 Cuban revolution and Guevara’s 1964 address to the United Nations in New York, while part two follows Guevara’s failed 1966-’67 campaign in Bolivia, culminating with his Oct. 9, 1967 execution. Neither part moves briskly nor stumbles into hackneyed hagiography.
Neither part, though, simply tries to dispense facts. Che isn’t a movie made for the Guevara novice—as it doesn’t indulge in any of the usual biopic condensing of a life or even stoop to that much establishing narrative with the usual setups—but it’s also not for the self-defined radical, as nothing in Che romanticizes the man or the so-called revolutionary spirit. Instead, Benicio Del Toro plays Guevara as a smart, physically demure, and intuitive soldier who shows up in Cuba under-prepared for guerilla fighting, but almost instinctually tenacious for the everyday work of cultural change: education, raising class awareness, and training the so-called average farm worker to become an engaged and committed citizen for a better tomorrow. Such educational work is neither glamorous nor cinematically gripping, but rather tedious, dayto-day drudgery that Soderbergh’s movie offers as the actual radicalism of the revolution. Che’s greatest achievement is this mundane fact, dramatizing a Guevara not as a charismatic agent of change, but a driven time-to-make-the-donuts worker. Its an attitude that informs the entire movie— Che’s skirmishes between rebels and the military rarely begin or end, merely transpire as if ongoing, an idea paralleled by Guevara’s educational and training sessions in both Cuba and Bolivia. Battles aren’t won, merely survived, and the movie itself never condescends to grandiose battle depictions, victory celebrations, or even the imperceptible accruing of artificial narrative tension. Instead, both parts of Che move with the deliberate argument of an extremely well-researched history book, and Soderbergh is careful not to slide into the conventional narrative film language that invisibly telegraphs how to feel. (As an example, there are but one handful of subjective shots in its entire running time.) Che is an incredible act of directorial restraint, but that impressive feat makes it feel more like a monolith to be studied and admired rather than a movie to be watched. And after enduring its 257-minute running time, its unclear what sort of affect the movie leaves you with. (BM) citypaper.com
MARCH 4, 2009
city paper | 21