If you didn't already own a motorcyle, you'll want one now

If there was ever a movie that would make anyone drop their briefcase, cancel their newspaper subscription and drive out on the open road with no place to go, “The Motorcycle Diaries” would be it.

“Diaries” is a biopic about the journey and written memoirs during 1952, of Ernesto “Fuser” Guevera, played by Gael Garcíal Bernal (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”), then, a young medical student. With the companionship of his older friend and biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), he sets off to finally “see” South America at its crudest and most candid form across 5,000 miles with an ancient motorcycle.

The two-hour film, directed by Walter Salles, not only projects beautiful and breath-taking scenery of the oceans, thick forests, raw mountains and weathered plains of South America, but it also captures the worn and sincere faces of its people.

Guevera and Granado meet the good friends they were hoping for: doctors, a leper colony, mistreated peasant laborers, menacing foremen, and loose, lovely ladies. However, lingering heavily in each of these engaging scenes is the air of disparity between the rich and the poor throughout all of South America.

Salles uses symbolism to highlight these social issues wherever he can, most notably, the wide river dividing the healthy doctors and staff of the leper colony from the dying patients on the other side. It’s as if Guevera gains 10 years of wisdom in each artful scene.

Salles brilliantly inserts black and white shots of the weathered poor. These aren’t stills, but the people are standing as still as they can to represent how critically their poverty and mistreatment by the government tainted Guevera’s naïve political perspective. Memories of these shots resonate throughout the film’s entirety.

The mystery of this movie, for anyone aware of Guevera’s path of eventually becoming the repressive leader, “Che” Guevera of Cuba’s Communist movement, is that Bernal’s performance is so sweet and endearing. The thought of his authoritarian future seems almost inconceivable…until you factor in the constant injustice he witnesses after leaving his sheltered upper-middle-class life as a student.

You can’t help but root for the happiness and success of Bernal and de la Serna until the end credits when you read that Guevera stood alongside Castro and smothered the civil liberties and freedom of speech of the people. This conflict makes the naïve aura of the lead characters all the more captivating.

While Bernal and de la Serna are strong and convincing in their parts, their dynamic never develops much past what you know – they are good friends. A traveling duo in all the great movies develops many complexities (think Thelma and Louise), and these two just don’t have it. Regardless, the strong performances by the minor characters hold their chemistry solidly enough.

For anyone passionate about art, history and coming of age stories, “The Motorcycle Diaries” is a wonderful cultured conglomerate of all three. The viewer will undoubtedly inherit tiny wisdoms from the characters’ conversions and leave him or her thinking long after the final credits.