Hotel Rwanda

reviewed Thu, 20 Jan 2005

So I had the day off for the inauguration – oh, joy, another four years of the Idiot Heir! – and I decided that, as long as my day was ruined, I might as well go see Hotel Rwanda, which I had been putting off seeing because it seemed like the kind of movie that would kill your whole day.  (My coworkers and I joked about doing a double feature on Inauguration Day of the two most depressing movies currently in theaters, Hotel Rwanda and The Woodsman – and then going to the Holocaust Museum.)

Well, Hotel Rwanda is simply an amazing, unforgettable film, quietly powerful and deeply moving.  Yes, it’s depressing – a movie that reminds you that a million Rwandans were massacred as the world did nothing will get you down – but it’s not a guilt trip, it’s not manipulative, and it’s enthralling.  Don Cheadle is fantastic as Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who’s the consummate fixer, greasing palms and stockpiling favors at the Mille Collines, the luxury hotel in Kigali where he’s working in 1994 when the first hints of trouble begin.  Paul is Hutu, but his wife is Tutsi.  As the movie explains, the Belgian colonizers favored the Tutsi because they were lighter-skinned, but they left the Hutu in charge when they departed, and the Hutu predictably exercised their resentment of the Tutsi.

One of the movie’s marvels is that it sustains such a gripping suspense when you already know what happens.  Very little violence is shown; it’s more psychological, emotional strain.  The build-up to the outbreak of violence is masterful, as tense as any horror movie’s climax.  By the time Paul realizes the enormity of the threat, it’s too late, and he finds himself the shepherd of over 1,200 refugees who take shelter at the Mille Collines.  He’s unbelievably resourceful and brave, but he never comes across as a superhero.  He’s always terrified, always acting out of desperation -- and basic human decency.  I had tears in my eyes throughout almost the entire movie, but Paul’s courage keeps the movie from being hopelessly depressing.

Jean Reno, Nick Nolte, and Joaquin Phoenix are good as sympathetic, horrified, but ultimately impotent Westerners who manage to help in small ways.  Phoenix, as a cameraman for a British reporter, has the line that resonated most with me, when he tells an incredulous Cheadle that his vivid images of a massacre won’t result in mass demands by Westerners for their governments to stop the slaughter:  “They will say, ‘That’s horrible,’ and go back to eating their dinner.”

It was this haunting sadness that drove me to a bookstore right afterwards to find more information.  I ended up with “A Problem from Hell,” which looks at the U.S. response – or, more accurately, lack of response – to genocides ranging from the Turkish atrocities against Armenians in the early 20^th century to the Rwandan conflict.  The U.S. comes off very badly in Hotel Rwanda – radio snippets feature Clinton assuring listeners that Americans are safe and bureaucrats nitpicking over use of the word “genocide” – and I wanted to find mitigating circumstances in Clinton’s defense.  After all, we’d just been through the shock of the Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia, and what popular support would there have been for American intervention?  Well, I’m not yet at the Rwanda chapter of the book, but already I can tell I’m not going to find any excuses here.  The American government apparently refused even as simple a request as jamming the radio broadcasts that incited and coordinated the attacks.

Ah, the radio!  The menacing, throaty voice on the radio is a character in its own right, sending chills down your spine with his icy denunciation of Tutsis as “cockroaches” that must be squashed.  The nameless voice makes Rush Limbaugh look like Leo Buscaglia.  When you think about what might have been if we had just jammed those broadcasts…. But that’s as pointless as my thoughts after the movie, reflecting on how people fell all over themselves to give money and aid after the tsunami but sat silently by as five times more people were slaughtered in Rwanda.  I know they’re different situations, but might the conflict have been avoided if the world had been more generous with Rwanda beforehand?

I can’t say enough about this movie, and yet I have nothing more to say except, go see it, go see it, go see it. 

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