We weren’t the only ones mildly bummed (but not surprised) over Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” being snubbed during award season. Sean Penn recently gave a shout out to Benicio del Toro and “Che” when he won the Best Actor honor at the Screen Actor Guild awards and the film is receiving a little love recently.
del Toro won the Best Actor award at the Spanish Goya Awards (their Oscars) yesterday in Madrid according to the BBC. Penelope Cruz also won for the Best Supporting Actor prize for her tempestuous turn in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” The film, “Camino” was the big winner and it took six awards, including Best Picture and Best director for Javier Fesser. “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” won the Best European Film award.
However, “Che” has been struggling in the press recently. Variety wrote about the “rough road,” the film faced with marketing difficulties overseas and IFC has yet to qualify the results of its VOD numbers. Recent headlines were made when del Toro walked out of an interview with the Washington Times* while being grilled about Guevara’s labor camps and executions. *we accidentally first wrote the Washington Post, not the Times, duh, sorry.
While it’s completely possible del Toro had no rebuttal, it is easy for the press to suggest that del Toro couldn’t defend the revolutionaries actions and just decided to bail rather than duke it out, but let’s not forget: he’s been promoting and talking about this film for almost over a year now and certainly since it debuted at Cannes last May.
The Washington Post might want to make much of del Toro’s frustration — writer Eric Gray does a video piece on top of writing about the walkout itself — but it seems odd of the Post of all people fitting of the conservative Times to milk it with video. Obviously they’ve caught him at the very tail end of this “Che” press cycle and del Toro’s obviously had to answer these questions before, but frustration does have to settle in at some point (in fact he answers these questions at length in this very recent Hufftington Post interview: “The fact of the matter is that as a military man he believed in capital punishment. The movie doesn’t shy away from that [issue]. I mean, we can’t show everything, but we do show an execution. We do show what he verbally said about capital punishment and executions in Cuba, and why. But he was no different than any other military man when it comes to capital punishment.”)
But as the writer himself says, “it makes for good copy.” Though to be fair, we’ve read a hundred interviews with del Toro about “Che” and he isn’t always the most articulate guy. Maybe it was an off day.