Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries

Filmmaker MacQuarrie (The Last Days of the Incas) assembles an overly ambitious mix of travelogue, history, and anthropological study that tours the Andes mountain range through stories of well-known people who inhabited the region in the past. The hodgepodge of miniature historical accounts, which leap around in time and subject, is strung together primarily by geography. The figures include Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s and ’90s, naturalist Charles Darwin on his trip to the Galápagos Islands, famous bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara during his last days in the Bolivian forest, among others. MacQuarrie interjects himself into the narrative, sometimes as a reporter (as when he interviews the colonel in charge of hunting down Escobar) and other times as a traveler (as when he recounts arguing with an elderly Chinese tourist about creationism while on a boat tour of the Galápagos). The time line of this personal subthread is never apparent and makes for a stringy, convoluted narrative that fails to create a comprehensive whole. Agent: Sarah Lazin, Sarah Lazin Books. (Dec.)