Willfully clunky at a difficult 4 ½ hours, Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” has been met with a mixed reception since its late 2008 release, not only for its length but also for its supposed inability to confront its subject on truthful terms.  While the latter may be true, it shouldn’t be counted as a criticism.  Played with sleepy, tingling ferocity by Benicio Del Toro, the Ernesto Guevara of “Che” is less a complete human being than the vivified amalgamation of all the qualities that earned him cultural celebrity: the intellectual lucidity, the fearlessness, the roving revolutionary spirit. To see the assembling of these shorthand markers into a character as a fault is to ignore what Soderbergh is trying to achieve.

To get a better idea of the ambitions of “Che,” it helps to view the film as the first section in a trilogy, paired up with the other two movies the director released in 2009.  “Che,” “The Girlfriend Experience” and “The Informant!” intersect at many points, with a particularly keen focus on commerce and protagonists who remain, to the end, essentially unknowable.

All three of these characters are involved in an ongoing process characterized by the willful misrepresentation of self.  Mark Whitacre lies, so often and so insistently that we cannot distinguish what about him is real. Christine/Chelsea hides, attempting to separate her home life from her prostitution via a successively thin façade. Che exhibits, shaping himself into a model revolutionary through behavior that remains resolutely self-conscious, always with an eye on how that behavior is perceived.  These concealing processes leave us with characters whose inner lives remain fundamentally restricted to the viewer.

In the case of “Che,” this approach to biography certainly feels like the best one for a figure whose actual self lies buried under stratified layers of dueling propaganda.  He’s not only a polarizing entity, but the tug-of-war between these poles (was he a hero or a villain? a martyr or a fool?) have ossified him into an image that in the collective consciousness more resembles a collection of ideas, behaviors and slogans than a real person.

Soderbergh is less interested in remedying this condition than exploring it.  Rather than liberate the ‘real’ Che by plumbing his inner depths, as the too cute, too facile “Motorcycle Diaries” (directed by Walter Salles) attempted, Soderbergh fixates on the external.  The result is less “who was Che” than “how did we end up with Che: the t-shirt,” analyzing the nascent kernel of sly self-promotion that would eventually turn his legacy into a hollow cultural touchstone, as well as battleground between hagiography and hatred.

In this sense, Guevara, a nickname replacing his given moniker, lays the groundwork for his own legacy.   A reluctant soldier at first, “The Argentine” (the first section, followed by “Guerrilla”) follows his increasing comfort in a commanding role.  The repeated careful close-ups that define this process suggest less a fawning, style-focused camera than mise-en-scène in service of subtext, demonstrating one of the inherent oxymorons of the act of revolution, where total selflessness is matched by the desire for the egotistical display of martyrdom.

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The film’s inter-cutting to Che’s 1964 appearance before the New York press serves as a reminder of this subtext, referencing one central milestone on the road to immortality.  Here he is presented not in the color of the other sequences but in tellingly stark black-and-white, a technique mirrored in the early scenes of “The Guerrilla,” where he hides from his created self by assuming a middle-aged bourgeois disguise.  In New York, Che has a rapt audience. Cameras flash.  Microphones are shoved in his face.  Making his first appearance on television he denies make-up at first, then quickly changes his mind.

This procedure of self-aware self-lionization which defines Che is of course not limited to him.  As devoted to freedom as his fellow revolutionaries must have been, there are undoubtedly other, less noble impulses behind their actions.  Like Che, Castro visited New York in the ’60s as head of state, and his behavior then – hobnobbing with blue-collar locals and promising to camp his entourage in Central Park – reeks of agitprop theater.  But unlike Che, Castro and most of the others were Cubans.  His role in the revolution was one he sought out, and this act, the dual suggestions of adventurism and heroism wrought by it, are typified by the differentiating focus of the section’s title.

The setting for the first half of “Che” and its protagonist’s major crucible, Cuba itself remains a distinctly unknowable place.  Shut off from the world, half-asleep in the past, the country seems, like Che, impossible to approach on even terms.  It’s telling that the best film associated with it is “I Am Cuba,” by Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov, which is both a visually effervescent masterpiece and a bastion of haughty propaganda.  The Cuba it offers is a storybook representation, first ruled by pitiless capitalist overlords, then liberated by glorious heroes.  In “Che,” the nation’s association with the protagonist remains a distinct part of the black-and-white nature of his legacy.

Another clear reference point is Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” one of 2008′s best films, which took a similar approach to biography.  The climax here hinges not on if Jesse James will be killed, but how.  Aware of, even obsessed with, the lasting power of his legacy, the outlaw orchestrates his own murder – shot in the back by an opportunistic coward – to make sure it stays spotless.

Taking all this into account, “Che,” which has puzzled critics by being generally realistic while still doggedly faithful to the usual talking points, makes a lot more sense.  Soderbergh’s Che is a dense screen through which some genuine light shines through, a would-be Jesus who rides a donkey, carries a staff and heals the sick, biblical affectations that feel purposely foisted to heighten the air of artificiality around him.  His persistent asthma, which hounds him through both sections of the film, functions as a reminder that there is a man inside.  In the same way the last scene, where the soldier who shoots Che informs him that he murdered his brother, reminds us of the blood on his hands.

Like Martin Scorcese’s “No Direction Home,” an otherwise traditional biography that presented Bob Dylan as an amorphous, self-created phantom, “Che” cloaks itself in the conventions of the biopic to achieve an opposite aim, striving for unknowability rather than coherence.  The man’s relentless drive for worldwide revolution is, on one hand, indicative of his inability to rest while people suffer.  But it also implies his inability to rest at all.  Forged into a totemic representation of the spirit of revolution, the film portrays the life of a man now doomed to haunt the earth as something less than one, consigned to t-shirts and teenagers’ bedroom walls.