Review
HOTEL RWANDA
Starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo and Nick Nolte
Co-written and directed by Terry George
Opens Friday, January 21
Globe Cinema
In the early scenes of Hotel Rwanda, Terry George’s stern, intense docudrama about one man’s heroism in the midst of genocide, there are many signs of the impending doom that would eventually claim 800,000 lives in the central African country in 1994.
When Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) goes to a warehouse to pick up beer for the posh hotel that he manages, he learns his supplier is now selling machetes, too. The announcers on Hutu radio stations make menacing references to the Tutsi "cockroaches." Steadfastly believing in the peace treaty that should’ve ended the civil war, Rusesabagina disregards the warnings. When he comes home to discover his family and his neighbours hiding in his bedroom, lest they be murdered in the streets by Hutu extremists, he realizes his country has slipped into hell.
Yet even after the massacres begin, Rusesabagina thinks order can be restored. And why wouldn’t he? In his job at the Hotel Milles Collines, Rusesabagina is the epitome of civility and rationality, solving every problem with his good manners and quick thinking. He expects the world – especially the diplomats and generals he plies with cigars and scotch – to share his values. "How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?" he asks Jack (Joaquin Phoenix), a TV cameraman who has filmed the killings taking place just outside the walls of the hotel. "I think if people see this footage," comes the response, "they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible.’ Then they’ll go on eating their dinners."
That indifference adds another level of horror to Hotel Rwanda, which is based on the true story of Rusesabagina’s struggle to protect hundreds of refugees in his hotel. The film itself is often straightforward to a fault – director and co-writer Terry George hews closely to all the conventions of the docudrama, from the exposition-heavy dialogue to the overbearing score to the questionable use of composite characters such as Nick Nolte’s Col. Oliver, who subs in for Gen. Romeo Dallaire as the Canadian leader of the UN’s hopeless peacekeeping effort. Yet because the story is so gripping, Hotel Rwanda succeeds as a vital and gutsy piece of political filmmaking. Playing a decent, rational man who must contend with unimaginable circumstances, Cheadle brilliantly conveys not only Rusesabagina’s fear, but his incredulousness at how the world could let his country fall into the abyss. The movie burns with the same sense of indignation. |
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