Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The world looked away when evil swept through Rwanda. Ten years later, a movie demands that we finally open our eyes.
Dec 22, 2004 | In "Hotel Rwanda" it's a few days into the 1994 genocide in which the majority Hutu tribe would eventually slaughter nearly a million of their Tutsi countrymen with no interference from the West. Refugees have holed up at the Mille Collines luxury hotel in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, waiting for the international intervention forces they expect to protect them from the marauding Hutus. Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte), who's in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, greets the arriving international troops with relief that, in just a few seconds, turns to disgust.
Following Oliver into the hotel bar, the manager of the Mille Collines, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), congratulates the colonel on how well he has protected the refugees while awaiting the international forces. What Paul doesn't know, and what Colonel Oliver has to break to him, is that the forces are there only to provide safe passage out of Rwanda for Europeans. They will do nothing to stop the slaughter or aid the Tutsis. The scene that follows between Cheadle and Nolte is so emotionally violent that it takes you a few seconds to register that you're hearing what you're hearing.
"You should spit in my face," says Colonel Oliver to Paul. "You're dirt. We think you're dirt, Paul ... The West, all the superpowers ... They think you're dirt. They think you're dung ... You're not even a nigger. You're African."
It's a shocking moment (did Nolte just tell Cheadle he's "not even a nigger"?), one that punches out its meaning in the bold typeface style of a tabloid headline. There's nothing artful about it, and yet it contains the heart of this shattering movie.
"Hotel Rwanda"
Directed by Terry George
Starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte
A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama, "Hotel Rwanda" -- which is based on a true story and was directed by a Westerner, Irish filmmaker Terry George, who cowrote the film with Keir Pearson -- is out to rub the West's nose in its refusal to intercede in stopping the genocide. And George and Pearson want to deprive us of the subsequent easy out of conceding that we sure did act terribly toward the Tutsis. Every time we see a Hutu bringing a machete down on the body of a Tutsi (and it should be said here that the film, rated PG-13, depicts the slaughter by suggestion), the movie wants us to think, "We allowed this to happen."
If that makes "Hotel Rwanda" sound like a bullying or self-righteous movie, it isn't. In spirit and technique, it's close to the muckraking films that Warner Bros. turned out in the early '30s, hard-edged pictures like "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" that aimed to shake up audiences' sense of justice and moral outrage.
It's not a pure film. George, who directed the terrific "Some Mother's Son," about the group of IRA hunger strikers that included Bobby Sands, uses the techniques of suspense movies here to work you over. (I was shaking when I left the theater.) At moments, particularly in a sequence involving a confrontation between Hutu killers and U.N. soldiers conveying a group of refugees to safety, "Hotel Rwanda" comes close to the tension of the sequence in the first "Godfather" film in which Al Pacino's Michael first commits murder. You watch it with your heart slamming against your rib cage.
Cheadle's Paul, a Hutu who has three children with his smart, gutsy Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo, who makes you feel as if each horror she witnesses etches a line on her face), has learned the key to being a success in his job managing the Mille Collines. Through a combination of glad-handing and bribes, he flatters the military and political big shots who frequent the hotel, and makes sure the place has the food and booze it needs to keep its upscale customers happy.
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