Originally posted 2/9/05
Hotel Rwanda
Director: Terry George
Writer: Keir Pearson and Terry George
Producers: A. Kitman Ho and Terry George
Stars: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Desmond Dube, David O’Hara, Cara Seymour, Fana Mokoena, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Tony Kgoroge
It can only be in the midst of madness that a loving husband and father finds himself forging desperate plans with his wife to make a suicide leap off a roof with their children should the need arise. But we have seen the alternative, and why with civilization collapsing around him he now considers this plan necessary.
Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) believes in civilization. He believes in good suits, articulate, respectful speech and the value of the finer things. A manager at the luxurious Hotel Des Milles Collines in Kigali, Rwanda, it is his job to smooth over bumps, instinctively know what people want or fear, and make sure everyone is relaxed and comfortable. If an Army General enthuses over a glass of single malt scotch, Paul efficiently excuses himself to have two bottles of the stuff slipped into the General’s suitcase.
In the back of his mind, though, something else buzzes; a more urgent purpose for his flattery and favors. He’s stocking a nest egg of gratitude that, behind his smile, he worries may someday need to be cashed in. Every day in Rwanda is a day he could lose everything important to him, because he is a Hutu who married a Tutsi.
The unexpected way that nest egg is cashed in, and the unique method by which Paul comes to be an unlikely savior on the level of an Oskar Schindler, is dramatized with powerful forthrightness in Hotel Rwanda, which will open the eyes of many, for the first time, about the horrors that unfolded a decade ago in Africa.
Unlike what you might expect, the Hutus and Tutsis are not ancient warring tribes at all, but arbitrarily separated castes delineated by Belgian colonialists. They selected the tallest, fairest, palest (you might read, most European-looking) people, dubbed them superior to the masses, and placed them in positions of power. When the Belgians left Rwanda, resentment bubbled into the surface – the minority was not so ready to relinquish authority, the majority was not so willing to continue submitting to a label of racial inferiority, and the country surged to the brink of civil war.
The world watched with a certain passive hope, the U.S. in particular. Whatever circumstances of politics and history held the outside world in check, it meant no one was there to stand against the heartrending disaster that exploded.
Hotel Rwanda sees the genocidal slaughter, which eventually left over a million dead, at ground level, through the eyes of Paul and his neighbors and relatives. It is this unblinking but not overwrought approach which defines the impact of the whole movie, a triumph for co-writer/director Terry George. His way of being able to frame the story in both small and large contexts at once and with overpowering emotion owes something to his former writing partner, filmmaker Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, In America). George keeps the acting underplayed, never uses gore for gore’s sake, and recreates with gripping immediacy the chaos and confusion that exploded after the assassination of Rwanda’s president.
For the people living through it, little is understood about exactly how it’s so quickly become organized, but soon Tutsis everywhere are being rounded up or slaughtered, either by the army itself or a machete-wielding militia the army will occasionally claim they have nothing to do with. Radio stations direct the mobs to where “cockroaches” are hiding.
Paul has always seen himself as a small man trying to survive in big circles, and thinks he has only enough wit and resources to save his family now. But his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) sees the threat to all of her people, and wants to save as many Tutsis as possible. So Paul does the only thing he knows how to do – he continues being a hotel manager.
As refugees stream into the hotel by the hundreds, he dummies up false guest lists, delivers phony room bills he never expects to see paid, and barters frantically with money and beer and promises to keep a few armed men protecting the gates from the militia. A Canadian officer in charge of the U.N. “peacekeeping” delegation (Nick Nolte) sees what Paul’s up to, and encourages it in whatever ways he legally can, disgusted by the world’s indifference. “You’re not even N***ers…you’re Africans” he confesses in drunken defeat, once he learns his orders are to evacuate all Europeans and let the Rwandans fend for themselves.
By some chain of luck and ingenuity it’s Paul’s very officiousness which helps him eventually shelter over a thousand Hutus and Tutsis. When the Army seems ready to haul everyone out into the street to shoot them, Paul makes a rather extraordinary phone call to the head of the conglomerate which owns the hotel (an un-billed Jean Reno). The particulars and results of this phone call I will not reveal, but suffice it to say Paul knows exactly what he is doing. “We must shame them into helping us” he instructs everyone.
Don Cheadle has an enormous task on his shoulders playing a man who doesn’t throw a punch or pick up a gun, but holds in his temper whenever he can and goes through enormous contortions as he continues to treat loathsome mass murderers with dignity. For years one of the best and most unsung of supporting actors, in this movie he is the strong and dynamic center, and the passionate Tatiana is its heart. “I know who you are” she says – even his courtship of her involved a well-placed bribe – and we get to see that in the darkest moment imaginable, it was Paul being exactly who he is which made him one of the most unexpected heroes the world has seen. And Hotel Rwanda provides a cinematic treatment worthy of his incredible story.