Hotel Rwanda
The movie received solid reviews – lots of B+ or 7 out of 10, or two thumbs up (but perhaps not way up) or 3.5 stars out of 5. In other words, almost universally critics thought it was good, maybe even great, but perhaps not in that absolute top tier of movies. I have to question that judgment. I thought it was fantastic. I have not yet seen Ray, so obviously I am in no positon to pass judgment, but I have serious doubts if his performance can have been much better than Don Cheadle’s masterful and subtly brilliant depiction of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the luxurious Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city.
It is also clear why Sophie Okonedo was nominated for best Supporting Actress. Nick Nolte also deserves kudos for his take as a frustrated and ultimately ineffectual UN general. Perhaps he is intended to depict Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general whose hands the UN thoroughly tied and who has been one of the most effective and pained spokesmen against what happened in Rwanda ever sense. He has a moment of transcendence in which he wearily tells Rusesabagina that in the minds of the world, “You are not even niggers, you are Africans.” The sneer that he applies to “Africans” somehow makes that last word seem even more vicious and hateful than “niggers.”
By now the story is familiar – Rusesabagina, who prior to 1994 had spent his time catering to the affluent and usually European guests of the Mille Collines suddenly finds himself in the midst of the Hutu genocide of the Tutsis that took place over the course of one hundred days from April to July 1994. Rusesabagina at turns cajoles, flatters, bribes, and flat-out lies to those with the power to do harm to the 1200+ refugees (“cockroaches”) he harbors in the hotel.
The movie is wonderful, but not easy to watch. I could not help but wonder if Hotel Rwanda was not more effective for me as a result of my knowledge of and background work related to modern Africa and Rwandan history. There were points at which I am pretty certain that someone with no background to the conflict might have been confused. But as an evocation of one man’s struggle to save a sliver of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered, most often by machete, the film was first-rate. I will certainly show it in my classes.
Some critics have argued that for once Hollywood actually understated the violence in the film. I tend to agree. In order to garner a PG-13 rating, director Terry George quite purposefully played down depictions of the atrocities. At times we see the bodies, but not the deaths. I can understand this approach and it does not bother me. However given how many purposelessly violent movies there are out at any given time, it seems to me that this was one case where rendering the violence would not have been pointless, where it would have underscored the monstrous undertaking of genocide. I had a tough enough time watching this movie, to be sure, but it may have been useful to show even more clearly just what Rusesabagina was up against, just how truly heroic were his efforts.
Among the extras is a short documentary in which Paul Rusesabagina returns to Rwanda and serves as something of a tour guide of some of the scenes of past atrocities. It is chilling.
Last year, the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, there was lots of reflection, most of which ended with some variation on the assertion that “never again” should we allow such atrocities to go unchecked. A few thousand soldiers with a mandate to act to prevent murder and violence could have thwarted the genocide in 1994. Instead Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton danced around definitional questions (Derek’s rule of thumb: if you are debating whether or not genocide is happening, then some pretty damned bad things are happening. Act immediately, and after the fact you can decide whether genocide is a good description of what occurred rather than at the time deciding if it is a good diagnosis for what is happening) and the UN proclaimed that they had no right to use force.
The latest estimates of the genocide in Darfur have 400,000 Africans dead. The graves are filling with each tick of the clock. Tick . . . tock . . . tick . . . tock . . .. Will we be watching Hotel Nyala ten years from now, pretending to learn these same lessons again?