Beyond the Gates
"Beyond the Gates" ends with an extra-special thanks to the survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide who helped make this well-meant drama. Assistant directors, someone from wardrobe, someone else from props, an electrician, a nurse: most of them lost a family member or several.
While it's a powerful, optimistic way to end a picture about the start of genocide, it raises a major problem: Why have we spent almost two hours watching how this atrocity affected the lives of a British Roman Catholic priest and a British teacher? Were none of the Rwandans' stories sufficiently interesting to the filmmakers to warrant more than a grateful footnote?
Completed in 2005, the film is set on the grounds of an English-run Kigali school that's protected by United Nations soldiers in the days before and immediately after Hutu rebels began the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi. John Hurt , excellent as usual, plays craggy Father Christopher, who runs the school, and Hugh Dancy is Joe Connor, an idealistic young teacher.
When violence strikes, the school becomes a makeshift base, and both men find themselves in the thick of the awfulness, risking their lives to help save the lives of imperiled Rwandans. Meanwhile, the UN soldiers do nothing to stop the killing. Dominique Horwitz plays the beleaguered Belgian captain, who never wavers from his sanctioned orders. His men are there to monitor the peace, not to enforce it, he says.
In part, the film intends to serve as an indictment of the UN's inaction, to show how diplomatic principle can seem just as deadly as the machete-wielding militia men. Indeed, when swarms of desperate Rwandans beg for entry inside the school's gates, Father Christopher demands they be let in. But the captain coolly reminds the priest, "This is a military base, not a refugee camp." He would need the Security Council's clearance. And firing a gun would require the direct authorization of none other than Kofi Annan himself. This would be funny if it weren't enraging.
"Beyond the Gates" becomes infuriating for altogether different reasons, too. Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt. The ones who do speak, like Marie, one of Joe's brightest students, played by Claire-Hope Ashitey (the exuberant mom-to-be in "Children of Men"), often do so beseechingly, as when Marie asks Father Christopher if he'll ever leave the village. That's a cheap moment of melodrama, since in the scene directly before we've seen him and Joe discuss leaving.
Our two heroes -- what else can we call them? -- have a monopoly on courage and bright ideas. Joe deduces that the best way to force the UN's hand is for a TV-reporter acquaintance (Nicola Walker ) from the BBC to broadcast the killings. Here, the movie presumes the genocide to be a media event. The only way its enormity can be comprehended is as a camera-ready tragedy. But the film, which was directed by the British veteran Michael Caton-Jones and written by David Wolstencroft , is shortsightedly grounded in the only Anglocentric truth it can wrap its mind around.
Movies about Africa often fall into this trap. Righteous indignation is the exclusive province of non-Africans. So are meaningful stories: We learn that the Belgian captain's grandparents saved Jews from the Nazis.
Instead, the Africans are too oppressed even to express outrage at their broken governments or the international agencies that fail to mend them. Abderrahmane Sissako's "Bamako ," which is still playing at the Coolidge, is a powerful corrective to the sort of narcissistic humanitarianism displayed in a movie like "Beyond the Gates": It insists the Africans speak for themselves.
In "Beyond the Gates," the night all those Tutsis are allowed on the school's premises Joe explains to his BBC acquaintance why he came to Rwanda, his words full of rue. "Growing up, I had everything a kid could want," he says. "It's just me trying to say, 'Thank you' I guess, trying to make a difference." He goes on to tell her, half-jokingly, he wanted to star in "my own Oxfam ad." Whether he realizes it or not, this movie grants him his wish.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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