Hotel Rwanda Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)December 21st, 2004
Hotel Rwanda
Matinee with Snacks
This is exactly the kind of movie that will kick butt all over the place critically and then, as the characters themselves note, drift away into the backs of our consciousness. The film is set in 1994, during a terrible internal genocide between two groups of Rwandans whose only actual difference was determined arbitrarily by outsiders from Belgium. These Tutsis and Hutus are fighting each other, and a massive rebellion of hatred boils over and results in a million dead.
But this is not some period piece or National Geographic special of alien cultures living in an alternate reality. Rwanda is not comprised of grass huts and spear-carrying savages. Rwanda is a place that looks very familiar - families, neighborhoods, tourism, markets, roads, television, kids on bikes, single malt scotch. Hotel Rwanda wants you to think, wants you to be aware of the comforts you enjoy in a free society, and it wants you to recognize that Africa's terrible travails go largely unnoticed by the rest of the industrialized world.
Director Terry George wrote this screenplay (a previous writing credit of his is In the Name of the Father) with newcomer Keir Pearson about the true story of unwitting hero Paul Rusesabagina, (Don Cheadle) a hotel manager who saved 1200 people during this terrible scourge. It is marvelous that at long last this backup singer gets to take the front of the stage and carry this film. Cheadle has been working for the white man in maintaining style and decorum and elegance and service as the most important things to his job, living on a borrowed passport in the world of denial which finally turns its back on him and his people. He is slow to recognize the true impact of the problem because he believes that the Europeans are his true friends. It is a subtle but impressive shift of perspective that Cheadle must portray, and he plays to all his strengths as an actor here.
Blurbs about the movie credit Rusesabagina as a courageous rebel, but what we really see here is a human who is having to come to terms with the capacity for evil within humans he has known all his life.
His initial heroism is not borne of bravery or rebelliousness, but merely doing what he knows to be his duty (however misplaced). His work is subtle, not showy - he won't have a clip of him howling and shaking his fist in some kind of Pacino Actorrhea moment. You must watch him as he changes, slowly and subtly. It is comparable to the uncomfortable tensions between Aryans and Jews in Germany in World War II, but with no hope of any Allies to come and help.
When these events took place in real life, I was not really in a place in my life where I watched the news very much. These days, I look at BBC online and American and Australian news sources for news that affects my day job. Even when searching for it, so little is reported on these kinds of events (and they seem to happen far too often in that part of the world) that we cannot begin to understand how terrible and how unconscionable our ignorance of that region is.
Hotel Rwanda (despite maintaining a PG-13 rating) gives us a tiny glimpse into the level of human destructiveness that goes on in Africa and does not make the evening news, particularly if someone attractive happens to be spotted at the Gap that day. It's hard not to feel culpable, even if you weren't aware of the events at the time. Go see it.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
