Movie Review: Hotel Rwanda (10/10)
As children of the digital age, we’ve grown up with horrific images of war and death piped into our homes for all of our lives. We’ve watched genocide in Africa over dinner on the evening news since as far back as we can remember, yet it never seems to really affect us. We hear about the million people murdered in Rwanda in the mid ‘90s, and the 70,000 who’ve been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan this past year, but we are unable to comprehend the horrific loss of life on such a large scale. To us, these numbers are too large to get our heads around, and the deaths lose all significance; we feel bad, but the situation is too surreal to fully comprehend, so we move on, finish our dinners, and put it out of our mind.
Hotel Rwanda accomplishes something staggering; it personalizes the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 while simultaneously allowing viewers to realize the full scope of the murderous rampage. The film tells the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, the manager of one of the swankiest hotels in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Following the assassination of Rwanda’s president, the tenuous ceasefire in the ongoing civil war is forgotten and all hell breaks loose in the city. Tutsi men, women, and children are torn from their homes and brutally slaughtered by their machete-wielding neighbors in the Hutu militia. Paul fears for his family’s safety, as even though he is a Hutu, his wife is a Tutsi, and he smuggles her and his children into his hotel, which is a safe haven by virtue of Paul’s deft dealings with UN peacekeeping forces and a Rwandan General. Though he originally intends to save his family only, he allows his Tutsi neighbors and friends to seek safety at the hotel as well. As tensions in the outside city increase and the four-star hotel’s wealthy guests rapidly flee the country, Paul turns into the proprietor of a de-facto refugee camp, accepting more and more people fleeing Hutu mobs until his hotel is packed with Tutsi refugees and Hutu moderates alike.
Early reviewers of the film criticized director Terry George for focusing too much on the story of Paul and not enough on the actual genocide, but by doing so, he has effectively given a human face to the atrocities that took place less than ten years ago, but are all but forgotten in the world’s consciousness. Rather than shocking its viewers with graphic violence like Steven Spielberg’s great but comparatively inferior epic Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda’s power lies in the strength of its performances and their raw emotional power. To say that the film is intense is an understatement. Don Cheadle snagged a Best Actor Oscar nomination last week for what I consider to be the best performance of the year, if not the decade thus far. He is completely lost within his character, playing a man who is at once selfish, frightened, and truly human. He is a hero without ever once fighting a battle or delivering a melodramatic soliloquy.
Perhaps the most resonant aspect of this wrenching movie is the fact that we as Western viewers watched it all unfold as we stood by and did nothing. Arguably, the film’s most powerful scene is when Paul walks in on American cameramen reviewing footage of Tutsis being hacked to death while the streets are littered with the corpses of children. He is elated when he assumes that the Western world can no longer ignore the humanitarian crisis in his country after viewing this footage, but then heartbreakingly crushed when the Americans apologize and explain that Westerners just don’t care enough to intervene. They were right, and one million deaths later, we can only sit in a theater, holding back tears, too late to do anything about it.
