Release Date: December 22, 2004
Starring: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Jean Reno, Joaquin Phoenix, Hakeem Kae-Kazim
Directed by: Terry George
Written by: Terry George, Keir Pearson
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, disturbing images, brief strong language)
There is a conversation in the Michael Mann movie Collateral that goes something like this: Jamie Foxx is talking to Tom Cruise, and Cruise asks Foxx if he’s ever heard of Rwanda. “Yeah, I know Rwanda,” says Foxx.
“Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown,” says Cruise. “Nobody’s ever killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye? Did you join Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Whale, Greenpeace, or something? No.”
Foxx doesn’t know what to say. “Man, I don’t know any Rwandans.”
Neither, for that matter, do most Americans, and unless they had an interest in world affairs in 1994, they will also be unaware that nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed in civil war and genocide over a three-month period that year -- a fact that Terry George’s historical drama, Hotel Rwanda, seems bent on reversing.
As an educational vehicle, Hotel Rwanda has its ups and downs, ranging from merely adequate to occasionally excellent. It fails, for instance, to clearly explain Rwandan politics and the reasons behind the civil war, and it never comes within 10 city blocks of indicting the United Nations or various national governments -- including the United States’ -- for failing to get involved. But it also provides a stage for Don Cheadle, the talented character actor, who gives an emotional, heartbreaking lead performance (his first) as the real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who saved 1,268 ethnic refugees from certain death by hiding them in his hotel.
Rusesabagina is thus something of a Rwandan equivalent to Oskar Schindler, although George, who also wrote the film with Keir Pearson, seems to think the Rwandan genocide is as infamous as the Holocaust. Simply put, it is not, and some details could have helped the picture.
As a scene near the movie’s beginning briefly explains, Rwandans fall mainly into two ethnic categories: Tutsis, a minority, and Hutus, the majority. The difference between them is indistinguishable, a myth perpetrated by Belgian colonists centuries ago, but for years the Tutsis were the ruling class; then, when the colonists left, the Hutus assumed power through strength of numbers, and the Tutsis were predictably subjected to all manner of atrocities.
Hotel Rwanda begins as the Rwandan president, a Hutu, signs a peace agreement with the Tutsi rebel army. The U.N. sends troops to Rwanda to facilitate the agreement (in the movie, they are led by a Canadian colonel played effectively by Nick Nolte), but before the agreement takes effect, the Rwandan president is assassinated by extremist Hutus who would rather see the Tutsis killed than make peace with them. Thus began one of the deadliest periods of killing in history, as the Hutu militia known as the Interhamwe (their leader is a businessman played by Hakeem Kae-Kazim) roamed across the country killing Tutsis and any moderate Hutus, like Rusesabagina, who dared oppose them.
The film’s biggest struggle is how to effectively convey the chaos, fear, and hopelessness that enveloped Rwanda for three months while the world looked the other way. Rwanda is hamstrung with a PG-13 rating, unable to truly depict the bloodshed in the streets as gangs of thugs and extremists cut down civilians and soldiers with machetes. On average, over 10,000 people were killed each day, a staggering number that George’s movie doesn’t come close to approximating.
It does occasionally get the fear right, especially in the more intimate scenes when Rusesabagina, his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo), and their family realize the country is slipping into anarchy and martial law. The most memorable of these comes when Paul, who has been hiding Tutsi refugees in his hotel in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, learns that the militia has found them out and is coming to kill them all. Paul calls the hotel’s corporate president in Belgium (a bit part done tastefully by Jean Reno) and asks for whatever help he can give and then, in an unbelievable act of selflessness, thanks him for the time he has spent with the corporation.
Cheadle is a quiet actor who excels at subtle emotion. He has a great scene in the middle of the movie when he tells the refugees in his hotel that there will be no international aid, and turns the bad news into an inspirational speech, telling them they must shame the rest of the world into sending help. He delivers this dialogue in a voice barely above a whisper, but it would resonate in a ten thousand-seat auditorium. It is the sort of moment they will replay in Cheadle’s lifetime achievement award montage 20 or 30 years from now.
Rusesabagina is not, however, Cheadle’s best work, though it may be the part that clears the way for a breakthrough role in the future. As Cheadle plays him, Rusesabagina is a tireless force, cajoling, coaxing, and persuading whoever can help him to give him whatever they can -- and even when the U.N. colonel, played by Nolte, tells him the rest of the world has turned its back, he’s not ready to give up.
The only things not to like about his performance are that he doesn’t quite have the accent down, and the movie -- which has put all of its best actors (like Reno, Nolte, and Joaquin Phoenix as a photojournalist) in small, thankless parts and the second-stringers in bigger, flatter roles -- occasionally overwhelms him. Cheadle is not the center of Hotel Rwanda the way Liam Neeson was in Schindler’s List.
This will not be the first unfavorable comparison to Schindler’s List that you read, but it is not because Rwanda is a bad film. It’s a rawer, more urgent movie, and one that deserves some slack. Historians and filmmakers have had decades to process World War II and the Holocaust, and thousands of volumes fill hundreds of libraries about the events then.
The ink on Rwanda, meanwhile, has barely dried. At the end of 2004, the genocide there was just 10 years past, and it was ongoing in other parts of the world, like Sudan -- suggesting that the world had not yet learned its lessons. This is why Hotel Rwanda is worth watching. It is not perfect, but it compels us to be, so that in another 10 years, when characters in a movie have a conversation about Sudan, or somewhere else, they will be able to say they were there when the world did something to help.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)