Hotel Rwanda
Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) is a fixer. He's the dapper, unfailingly polite gentleman behind the manager's desk at the Hotel des Mille Collines, and if you're a wealthy tourist his purpose in life is to make your life easier. But this hotel is in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, and it's early April, 1994. The gates of hell are about to open. Paul doesn't know it yet, but if you're a member of the Tutsi clan, his purpose in life will be to save yours.
"Hotel Rwanda," the true story of how one man kept 1,268 men, women, and children from being murdered by passing them off as "guests," has been called an African "Schindler's List." The comparison isn't entirely glib. Both movies are essentially about heroic businessmen who know how to turn bureaucratic inertia to their advantage, and who use bribery, flattery, and cajoling where a different man might use a gun.
In other respects, obviously, the two films are nothing alike. For one thing, "Schindler" was made by a craftsman working at the peak of his art, while "Hotel Rwanda" has been directed with urgency and heart but no particular style by Terry George, the screenwriter of "In the Name of the Father." In his defense, style shouldn't matter if a filmmaker is burning to get his story to as large an audience as possible. Still, a better made movie might ultimately reach more people.
In any event, that's not to denigrate the two strengths of George's movie: its sense of moral outrage and Don Cheadle. The Rwandan genocide was perhaps the most unforgivable foreign-relations lapse of the Clinton administration, but the United States was hardly alone: The United Nations reduced its peacekeeping force to 270 men -- for the entire country -- and Europe turned its collective back as Hutu extremists inflamed bloodlust against the Tutsi minority. Nearly 1 million people were killed in 100 days, the most rapid genocide in history. Many of the victims were hacked to death with machetes.
Nobody wanted to know. At first Paul doesn't want to know: a Westernized middle-class Hutu in a three-piece suit, he keeps telling his Tutsi wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) not to worry, everything will be fine. Then people in his neighborhood start being taken away. Then the Westerners bail. Then his young son is found covered with someone else's blood. The hotelier starts "checking in" refugees because the alternative is simply unthinkable and because he's one of the few sane people left in the country with connections high up in the militia.
With a PG-13 rating designed to get more viewers in the door, "Hotel Rwanda" is surprisingly unbloody -- we see more bodies than killings -- and that robs the movie of an impact it could use. George makes his points with blunt force nevertheless. Nick Nolte plays a sympathetic UN colonel, a composite of actual soldiers, whose despair turns increasingly furious as the film progresses.
Joaquin Phoenix is on hand as a slacker-dude news cameraman who gets a quick reality check; it's through him we learn that the Hutus and Tutsis were never distinct ethnic tribes so much as two classes marked off by Belgian colonists (the Hutus got the lousy jobs) and who, in a grotesque irony, are about as distinct from each other as Sneetches.
"Hotel Rwanda" progresses in a lurching series of disasters, with Paul using his wits, his dwindling supply of food and booze, and, in a pinch, a phone call from the Belgian CEO of the hotel chain. When all else fails, he begs -- politely. And so he takes in still more people: old folks, a group of orphans, whomever. Cheadle, a self-effacing actor to begin with, never tips his hand; he gives a gracefully controlled performance because Rusesabagina is a gracefully controlled man. This makes the scene in which the character does crack -- alone, where no one can see him -- the most powerful in the movie.
In keeping with a film featuring such a quiet hero, the villain of "Hotel Rwanda" is hard to pin down. There are the strutting militia men, and the kids with machetes and AK-47s; there's a sneering Hutu hotel employee who is Paul's opposite in every way. But the evil streaming through this movie is literally in the air, in the broadcast radio exhortations of the Interhamwe militia to "squash the infestation." This is the miasma of Nazi Germany and Bosnia, with one crucial difference: It's Africa and no one outside the continent gives a damn. The cameraman knows that when people in America see his footage, "They'll say, 'Oh, my God, how horrible,' and go back to eating their dinner."
I wish "Hotel Rwanda" felt like something more than a very, very good TV movie. But it doesn't matter what I think. The twofold agenda in "Hotel Rwanda" is to commemorate what Paul Rusesabagina did and to shame each and every Westerner who sees the movie. On both of those counts it is successful.
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