‘Hotel Rwanda’

This true story almost goes over the top recounting the horrors of the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority.

By: Elise Nakhnikian

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Don Cheadle (right) saves as many people as he can in ‘Hotel Rwanda.’


   Hotel Rwanda, which tells the story of how hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina saved hundreds of his countrymen during the 1994 genocide in which Hutu hatemongers massacred Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, is an elegantly streamlined and deeply moving tale with a tact worthy of its extraordinary hero. Yet there was something about the way it made me feel that left me uneasy.
   What do we really get out of seeing a genocide fictionally re-enacted 10 years after the fact? Gaining a better understanding of the event, which was one of the worst horrors of the last century, is surely worth something. Raising awareness of other genocides, especially the ones occurring in Sudan and the Congo, would be something too, and appears to be what motivated Rusesabagina to tell his story on celluloid. But do movies like Hotel Rwanda really increase our sensitivity to genocide and inspire us to try to prevent it, or do they just give us the easy catharsis of weeping for events that are safely in the past?
   If you’re going to make a movie about a decade-old atrocity, you can’t do much better than this one. The general manager of a four-star European hotel in Kigali, Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) has made an art of customer service, stroking the powerful until they purr. In private life, too, he’s the kind of well connected, endlessly resourceful man people go to for help when they need something done. But his smoothly operating world explodes into shrapnel when Kigali is turned into a slaughterhouse and nearly everyone in it into either butchers or meat.
   Repeatedly facing down guns or machetes, Rusesabagina has to use every trick he knows just to keep himself, his Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo), and their three children alive. Then there are the terrorized refugees who keep finding their way into his hotel, which the paying guests and manager fled as soon as the killing started.
   It’s a challenge just to keep the place running, with the staff inclined to anarchy now that the head manager is gone and the pantries emptying fast under the strain of so many extra guests — not to mention staff who keep helping themselves to the beer. But Rusesabagina’s unflappable calm and organizational skills set a tone of civilized normalcy that the others are relieved to adopt.
   Rusesabagina’s devotion to his family helps him create a calm eye in the middle of the storm, but it also contributes to some of his worst scares. The first happens when his young son Roger goes missing at night and shows up drenched in blood and too traumatized to talk.
   Roger later told his parents that he had gone to play with a friend and found him and eight other neighbors either dead or dying in agony, but we never hear that story in the movie. Hotel Rwanda scrupulously avoids wallowing in onscreen deaths or excessive gore. In one scene, for example, a UN transport vehicle taking Tatiana and the children and others from the hotel to a refugee camp is hijacked by a Hutu mob. In the movie, the convoy is saved just as one of the men puts a machete to her throat. In life, Rusesabagina told a reporter, she was so brutally beaten by the attackers that "she lay in bed for two weeks, unable to turn herself." But the film shows us plenty, letting us see and hear enough of what’s going on outside the hotel’s gates to understand the barbarism that is running wild in the city.
   Co-writer and director Terry George’s script and direction are generally quietly effective without drawing attention to themselves, but there are several notable exceptions. Early on, the hate-filled talk and coded signals to kill Tutsi "cockroaches," which are transmitted via radio, take on a malevolent life when Rusesabagina twists the dial of his car radio at night, trying in vain to find a station that isn’t broadcasting the same evil hiss. Also memorable is a nighttime visit to the hellish headquarters of George, one of the men behind the killings, who Rusesabagina buys off by buying his supplies, and the foggy ride back along a bumpy road that turns out to be lined with dead bodies. There’s also a lovely little moment when the camera seems to catch some of the orphan girls in the hotel unawares as they do a head-bobbing dance along the edge of the pool.
   It’s wonderful to see the luminescent Don Cheadle get his shot at a starring role. Ever since seeing him play a murderous sociopath in Devil With a Blue Dress, a heartbreakingly sweet porn star in Boogie Nights, a spot-on Sammy Davis Jr. in The Rat Pack and a conflicted teacher in the Jim Crow South in A Lesson Before Dying during one four-year stretch in the late ’90s, I’ve been convinced Cheadle could do anything. He may have met his Waterloo with Rusesabagina’s Rwandan accent, but that’s quibbling of the lowest order, considering what a fine job he does of portraying the man’s intelligence, dignity and heart. Okonedo is every bit as good as his wife, playing her scenes with a wrenching reality and lack of vanity that is rarely seen in American actresses (she was born in Britain to an English mother and a Nigerian father).
   Aside from Nick Nolte, who plays a significant part as a UN colonel sickened by his own organization’s ineffectiveness, all the main characters are Africans, all played by black actors and many by Africans. It’s refreshing to see that the filmmakers didn’t think a white protagonist was needed to attract white audiences. I expect they’ll be proven right, in which case this movie may change the world a bit in at least one way, making it easier for other ethnic movies to be told without a "neutral" white protagonist plunked into their centers.
Rated PG-13. Contains violence, disturbing images and brief strong language.