Directed by Terry George
Written by Terry George and Keir Pearson
Starring Don Cheadle, Nick Nolte and Joaquin Phoenix
Classification: 14A
Rating: * * *
When he first appears as a Rwandan hotel manager in the docudrama Hotel Rwanda, American actor Don Cheadle is the embodiment of the servile and diligent colonial subaltern. Playing in every scene, he speaks in lilting, accented English, has an upright posture and a salesman's impersonal smile. We see him early on, plying fine Scotch and Cuban cigars to military brass and other VIPs who may some day prove useful. Throughout the film, Cheadle's eyes are constantly scanning his environment for opportunities or anything that may be amiss.
In a profession trained to observe, an attentive hotelier serves as a good witness, even when the crime is on a massive scale. Hotel Rwanda is based on the real story of Paul Rusesabagina, who ran the Belgian-owned four-star Mille Collines hotel in Kigali in 1994. During the 100-day genocide when an estimated 800,000 to one million people were murdered, he took charge, turning his hotel into a sanctuary where he saved more than 1,200 lives (the website for the hotel says it has just 112 rooms).
Director Terry George's movie, which uses Rusesabagina's story to memorialize the Rwandan genocide, is being trumpeted as the "African Schindler's List" for its attempt to put a human face on a statistical atrocity.
There is much to respect in Hotel Rwanda, not least Cheadle's subtly crafted performance, which allows the audience a direct connection to his ethical growth. As well, this is the first mainstream movie to deal directly with the Rwandan massacre and to indict the West's failure to respond to the massive humanitarian crisis. For a welcome change, it's a mainstream movie that tells an African story without focusing on white characters. At the same time, Hotel Rwanda - winner of the audience-favourite award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, and widely hailed as an Oscar contender - is also a ruthlessly calculating emotional button-pusher.
Northern Irish writer-director George specializes in stories of moral outrage (he directed Some Mother's Son and wrote In the Name of the Father). With co-writer Keir Pearson, he has chosen to fashion the film as a political thriller with an inspirational hero.
As the movie starts, tensions are mounting in Rwanda's capital as radio station RTML, played from passing trucks, incites hatred toward Tutsi "cockroaches" in the population. When the president is assassinated and Tutsi insurgents are blamed, the explosion of violence in the streets is swift and implacable as machete-wielding mobs begin their mass slaughter.
Using flattery, bribery and subtle blackmail, Rusesabagina repeatedly manages to avoid the destruction of his guests and family. Though he is a Hutu, his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) is a Tutsi. On the emotional level, George is just as crafty in his manipulations as the resourceful hotelier. The movie turns into a series of cliffhangers, last-minute rescues and narrow escapes, interrupted by scenes of pathos.
Rusesabagina and his wife make a pact to kill themselves and their children rather than face the murderers. A group of African orphans is left on the runway in the rain while a plane takes its white passengers to safety. On a risky nighttime ride out for provisions, Rusesabagina discovers what's making the road so bumpy - piles of corpses.
Hotel Rwanda is a movie made to inspire, or thrill, but not to horrify, and George keeps the carnage at a sanitized distance, seen through a fog or on a television screen. Most of the action takes place in the hotel building or at the front gate, where, weathering a series of tense confrontations and a shortage of supplies, Rusesabagina remains the dutiful employee. Only when Westerners intervene just long enough to get their own people out does he emerge from reflexive subservience to quiet outrage.
George uses the white actors here more as representative types: French star Jean Reno, owner of the Belgian hotel chain for whom Rusesabagina works, stands for European business interests; Nick Nolte plays Colonel Oliver, a self-loathing, bellicose UN commander with a Canadian patch on his shoulder, representing the helpless giant of the United Nations. (General Roméo Dallaire may have grounds to sue over several issues, not the least of which is being busted down to a lowly colonel.) Joaquin Phoenix plays Jack, an American television cameraman, standing in for the cynical Western media.
In conversations, we overhear the snapshot version of Rwanda's tribal wars and the blame is laid on the Belgian colonialists who exploited and exaggerated Hutu and Tutsi differences. France provided arms and military training. When Jack shows Rusesabagina videotape footage of a massacre he has shot outside the hotel, the manager is excited, believing this will surely help bring an end to the slaughter when the world sees what is happening. The cameraman sets him straight: "If people see this footage they'll say, 'Oh my God, that's terrible,' and they'll go on eating their dinners."
While it slams apathy and ignorance, Hotel Rwanda, in pumping the dramatic opportunities, doesn't always make the history clear. You can, for example, easily leave the movie with no real sense that the Rwandan genocide was the culmination of a sophisticated campaign of mass deceit, hate-mongering and terror orchestrated by Hutu ringleaders who counted on Western ignorance and indifference.
As New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch said in his book on the Rwandan catastrophe, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, people can't empathize with what they can't understand: "Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus - if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it."