Hotel Rwanda


by Shari L. Rosenblum

An oasis of calm is what they called it, the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda—a gleaming structure where diplomats and dignitaries, black and white alike, found haven from the teeming streets and the day-to-day in European luxury. In the Spring and early Summer of 1994, when the Hutu waged a war of genocidal vengeance against their former Tutsi overlords, it stood also as an oasis of hope, where frightened Tutsi families and orphaned children found refuge from the machete-wielding mob outside its gates. Hotel Rwanda is a film about what happened in those 100 days around the Mille Collines. Based on true events, it has a message beyond the outrage of the moment.

:Co-written (with Keir Pearson) and directed by Terry George, Hotel Rwanda takes the same tack as George's Irish set pieces (Some Mother's Son, The Boxer, In the Name of the Father): it shows the personal side of the political, the intimate heart tug within the infinite horrors; family as the pulse of politics. The details are in the margins: disembodied voices from the radio echo throughout the film, urging massacre, a propaganda begun with “cutting down the tall trees” (the Tutsi superiority) and leading with calls for extermination of the Tutsi “cockroaches”— and unimaginable acts are captured in video footage on the t.v. But Hotel Rwanda focuses on one man and his acts: Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the Hutu manager with the Tutsi wife and children that took the hotel from oasis to oasis.

Rusesabagina is a decent man with the finesse and the fine-line blurring of a master servant. Proud African with a penchant for European style, he knows how good whiskey and smooth cigars can grease palms and win favors. And he knows how to store those favors up for the long days ahead. He is single-minded and determined. He has faith in the European presence. Hearing the first strains of violence as he makes his way from his 5-star hotel to his comfortable middle-class home, he refuses to believe the dangers they announce. When Hutu soldiers round up and brutalize the neighbors across the way, he is not spurred to action. He tells his wife they can do nothing; their collected favors are finite—and the neighbors are not family.

But as the days pass, and faith is little rewarded, the idea of family changes for Rusesabagina; it expands. As neighborhoods are razed and mutilated bodies piled on lawns and along the road, it begins to encompass neighbors and strangers, nuns and hotel staff, and children from anywhere. And the Mille Collines becomes the luxury home into which he invites them all for their salvation, even as a delirium of savagery threatens to consume it. Unlike Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, to whom too many reviews carelessly compare him, Cheadle, who acts with understatement, darting his eyes, and keeping the flash of his smile to restricted moments, plays the character in evolution with perfect measure. He is believable in denial, believable in transition, believable as the saviour-in-spite-of-himself; the man who gets things done because they need to be done. Sophie Okonedo (Dirty Pretty Things), who plays his wife, is somewhat less persuasive—but the fault lies in the writing of her role rather than in the performance itself. Her behaviors do not ring completely true.

Hotel Rwanda, however is not really interested in understanding the events of 1994 . makes no record of the history that came before the crisis at hand, the acts of the past that stirred the masses to murderous rage—except to say that the Belgians were behind it all.(and though they were, to some extent responsible for throwing forces together, and leaving them adrift, the film's take is often ahistorically unbalanced). While the Hutus cut the Tutsis down offscreen—the West is charged with the greater crimes of ignorance (modeled by Joaquin Phoenix, as an ingenuous journalist with a liberal's beard) and apathy (as railed against by Nick Nolte, as a rare U.N. officer who actually cares). We know nothing; we care about nothing; we think only of ourselves. Phoenix stands as our proxy in the film, with no clue as to what's going on, asking pointed questions about what distinguishes the one tribe from the other, and commenting aloud on things that should go unstated. But his passage from naiveté to contrition is meant to pave the way for our own. From the other side, Nolte's colonel's self-repudiating militancy (“you should spit in my face” “we think you're dirt”)—shaking his head in disgust that the European powers would seek to save European nationals rather than the whole of the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda (insisting on the racial rather than the national distinctions between the two), condemns the West even for its acts of interference, as they are not enough.

Too many critics praise Hotel Rwanda for making them aware of something of which they should have been aware; as if sighing or crying at a film is the same as committing to a cause. As if their newfound consciousness will last beyond the Oscar ceremony. Hotel Rwanda might have been criticized for sentimentality if it had been content to be just a tale of heroism and humanity, moving us just to anger and to tears; but it has a loftier goal. Not to inform us, but to change us from the inside out by telling us only half the story, pointing and wagging its finger at us—laying blame and tsking shame at the West as it unfolds its catalogue of atrocities from another world.

It is impossible not to be moved by Hotel Rwanda— but it is impossible, too, to accept the simplistic answers it offers to the questions it fails to ask aloud: not just, what is our responsibility to worlds beyond our world? But, where does our responsibility for our own acts begin and end? What makes some people more responsible than others? And who is to say? And if tears rolled down my face as the final credits rolled, am I now a better person than I was before?

©2005 Shari L. Rosenblum
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