“Hey, they brought food!” Really, there could’ve been no sweeter words to hear at the halfway point of Che on Wednesday night. By then, the experience was already entering its fourth hour, with the film’s first stretch of two hours and 10 minutes following the 90 minutes spent in line to make sure I could get into the festival’s most widely anticipated title. When Steven Soderbergh’s tribute to the 20th century’s most photogenic revolutionary will be released in North America — provided that a distributor will pony up the estimated $8 to $10 million for the rights for a Spanish-language epic that’s nearer in its politics and sensibility to a Peter Watkins movie than any Hollywood biopic — this first part will be called The Argentine. The second part — which runs another two-hours-plus — will be Guerilla.

But “Che” was what it read on the stickers on the bags in the lobby that arrived at intermission. Inside each was a bottle of water, a small Kit Kat bar and a sandwich on white bread — a proletariat feast! The critics munched excitedly — surely such abundance awaits us when we are able to live in that workers’ paradise we were promised. We also deserved a reward after enduring the challenges posed by The Argentine, which juxtaposes glimpses of Guevara in his early career and in his visit to the United Nations in New York in 1964 with his grueling experiences during the Cuban Revolutionary War, ending with the attack on Santa Clara. A dense and complex barrage of facts, faces and places, it can feel like sitting through a history lecture for a course you’re doomed to fail.

But the first part very much makes the second part, as the determined and ultimately triumphant tone of The Argentine gives way to something more fatalistic and pessimistic in Guerilla, which concentrates on Guevara’s efforts to replicate his earlier revolution in Bolivia. In place of the community spirit of the Cuban scenes comes a lonelier portrait of an idealist who grows increasingly unable to protect or direct his comrades. With the Bolivian people rejecting him as a foreigner and the army edging closer (with the help of some shadowy US military “advisers”), Che wastes away in the jungle, crippled by the inhuman conditions and his lifelong struggle with asthma.

As Che, Benicio Del Toro is convincing and unsentimental — like the film around him, Del Toro defines the quality of Guevara’s character by emphasizing his actions over his words. That gives the film an uncommonly physical sense of presence and an urgency even in the face of the demands it places on viewers, which Variety’s Todd McCarthy deemed grave enough to consider the movie a “commercial impossibility.” Whether Soderbergh’s two-fer really revealed much about Guevara — which you might’ve expected given the project’s girth — was another topic of debate among critics as they stumbled out of the theatre. But one thing’s for certain: the revolution will come with a free sandwich.