Hotel Rwanda

I couldn't believe it when I first looked at the DVD box for Hotel Rwanda. Rated PG-13? It's a movie about genocide, a film set against the backdrop of a massacre that took 1 million lives. I'll type that again, for emphasis. The genocide in Rwanda at the heart of this story took the lives of 1 million people. It's totally unfathomable destruction and cruelty.

And they made a movie about it. A movie that's PG-13.

Don't get me wrong. Hotel Rwanda is a good movie, a worthwhile movie, a film that uses traditional Hollywood techniques to tell an important story. There's nothing original about the filmmaking in Rwanda, but it's well-crafted enough to get the point across. 1 million people died for no good reason, and the wealthy nations of the West stood idly by and allowed it to happen.



For a major Hollywood film to take that kind of stand is significant enough, really. There are always films that come out dealing with tragic events in recent world history. But usually these films focus on the immediate horror of the situation, and they always feature brave Europeans and Americans to offset any potential critique. Think Black Hawk Down, a film that dealt with the Battle of Mogadishu and the surrounding instability in Somalia by focusing entirely on American military tactics and casualties.

But Rwanda gets right in your face about the moral failure of the Western government and press. At one point, Nick Nolte (playing a general for the UN) gets one of his trademark frothing-at-the-mouth monologues, this time decrying Westerners for their racism in choosing to ignore the ongoing violence in Rwanda. Good for writers Terry George and Keir Pearson. Though much of the actual violence itself is muted in the movie, probably to preserve that PG-13 rating, the social commentary is extremely frank for a change.

Like most films about unbearable tragedy, Rwanda chooses to focus on a real event near to but not neccessarily central to the conflict. In this case, it's the story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), a savvy capitalist who has made many important connections in his years running an exclusive Rwanda hotel. By 1994, a conflict that had brewed for years in Rwanda between warring tribes tribes that we learn in the film were created randomly by the Belgians during their colonization of the country. One tribe, the Hutu, are slaughtering the Tutsis by the thousands. Unfortunately for Paul, a Hutu, his wife and extended family are Tutsis, and therefore their lives are in danger. So Paul brings his family and their neighbors to stay within the safety of his hotel.

If this plot sounds familiar, that's probably because it's the exact same story as Schindler's List. A wealthy man with connections in the military and government uses his influence to save the lives of refugees, while making it appear on the surface that he's simply running a business. What's even more amazing is that both of these stories are true. Tragedy, I suppose, tends to breed similar kinds of heroism.

The Spielberg film attempted to understand the heroism of Oskar Schindler, a man who seemed, before the Holocaust, content to live as a war profiteer and social Nazi. What could have suddenly motivated him to come to the rescue of so many strangers? Hotel Rwanda kind of takes its protagonist's sacrifice as a given - faced with the savagery of the Rwandan massacre, what good man could refuse to help his neighbors?

Director Terry George seems more interested in the how's than the why's, in the methods used by Paul to keep himself and his family alive. What George really brings out of this story is the use of language, how the right words at the right time could make all the difference. Paul often finds himself with a gun in his face, and only his mouth can save him, time and again.

Cheadle's always been good at playing verbal characters, people who live by their wits and speak intelligently. This is rare in films, where even intelligent characters don't actually speak very intelligently. But Cheadle has a way of indicating that a lot of thought has gone into every word he's about to say, and as Rusesabagina, he's constantly negotiating.

Most of this material is handled exceptionally well, clear and concise, save for one scene near the end of the film finds Rusesabagina negotiating with a general (Fana Mokoena, in a terrifyingly cold turn) for protection. Rusesabagina actually manages to convince the general to keep him alive so he can later testify at a potential war crimes trial. Would this really work? Wouldn't a general who has faced a good deal of success shrug off this kind of offer, feeling that he was too powerful to be tried in the Hague for war crimes? The whole scene has kind of the feel of a bad "Hogan's Heroes" episode, where Hogan convinces Klink to let him form a softball team in exchange for a favorably worded letter to Der Fuhrer?

But other than that minor misstep, Rwanda is a considerably powerful film. It's probably the most disturbing PG-13 film ever released, but hey, it's about a horrible massacre. Those are the breaks.