Hotel Rwanda

A civil action: Hotel Rwanda captures one man's quiet valor in the face of genocide

By Jeannette Catsoulis

In a nation singularly uninformed about the rest of the world, movies dealing with serious global events, even in a fictionalized way, bear a special burden to get things right. For good or ill, Spielberg's notion of the Holocaust and Michael Bay's vision of Pearl Harbor--not to mention Oliver Stone's view of just about anything--become embedded in our collective consciousness more stubbornly than any news report or historical document.

Hotel Rwanda opens this week already buckling from the weight of this responsibility. More than just the largest and bloodiest massacre in recent memory--800,000 dead in 100 days--the 1994 Rwandan genocide was the most shameful foreign policy lapse of the Clinton administration. While the U.S. and the U.N. stood by, the majority Hutu systematically slaughtered the wealthier, more educated Tutsi (and some of the more moderate Hutu) for reasons commonly ascribed to ethnic rivalry. In the midst of the carnage, Paul Rusesabagina (played in the movie by Don Cheadle), manager of the Belgian-owned Hotel des Mille Collines, sheltered 1,000 staff and assorted refugees until peace was finally restored.

Perhaps deciding the reasons for the genocide are too complex to address, director Terry George keeps his political outrage on low and narrows his focus to this singular act of courage. His film opens in Kigali as the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana sparks ominous reprisals: mysterious arrests, burning homes, power and phone service disruptions. Paul, a Hutu, and his Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) are besieged by anxious neighbors seeking help; as the manager of a 4-star hotel, he is known to have connections. As the streets fill up with Hutu militia, Paul transports his family and an ever-growing throng of terrified neighbors to the hotel, and for the next 115 minutes he's the only thing standing between them and the bloodthirsty hordes massing outside.

The most effective aspect of Hotel Rwanda is its delicate implication in the postcolonial status system Paul exploits to protect his "guests." In the eyes of the natives, the imposing hotel--and its far-off Belgian owners--retain the power to intimidate. From habit, the Hutu act with respect inside its plush foyer as Paul operates a desperate system of bribes and favors to buy time. His prewar connections with the military elite which once conferred simply cachet are now his main hope for saving lives, and Cheadle is magnificent in his transformation from self-effacing manager to skilled negotiator. Paul is a one-man diplomatic machine.

But while the film stares fixedly at Paul and his problems, the larger picture goes unexamined. Muted in the background are the repercussions of President Clinton's refusal to classify the killings as a genocide, and the U.N.'s refusal to order its few peacekeepers to intervene. Indeed, the film's most pungently political statement--unfortunately uttered by a characterless Joaquin Phoenix playing a photojournalist--slips past like lightning. "You're not even a nigger. You're an African," he tells Paul, explaining why the Rwandans' plight will cause little concern at American dinner tables.

Lacking a clear context, Hotel Rwanda remodels a genuinely horrifying event into a backdrop for familiar Hollywood tropes of self-sacrifice and family-źber-alles tear-jerking. And though addressing one of the few topics that virtually demand we leave the theater bathed in blood and fact, the movie delivers only soft-focus violence (cowering African women and mist-shrouded corpses) and primitive iconography (a case breaking open in a food market to reveal dozens of gleaming machetes). Far more informative--and emotionally wrenching--is Steven Silver's meticulous documentary, The Last Just Man, which focuses on U.N. General Romeo Dellaire and his heroic efforts to save the Tutsi in defiance of his superiors.

Well-intentioned if ultimately unsatisfying, Hotel Rwanda is an honorable attempt to represent a single strand of an extremely tangled atrocity. The movie deserves to be seen, if only to remind us of the cost of looking away.