January 6-12, 2005

movies

Safe at Home

Rising to the occasion: As Paul Rusesabagina, Don Cheadle (center) has a humble complexity Hotel Rwanda otherwise lacks.

Hotel Rwanda's pat denunciations are more comforting than challenging.

by Sam Adams

There's no way to raise a movie critic's hackles faster than to interrupt an enthusiastic tirade on behalf of this or that underappreciated masterpiece with the words, "It's only a movie." At root, it's a way of saying movies don't matter, that they're not to be taken too seriously, which is not something anyone who spends a good part of their life in the dark wants to hear. But given the kinds of reviews Hotel Rwanda has been getting, it seems necessary to point out that Terry George's docudrama is, in fact, only a movie. Granted, it's a movie on an important subject: the 1994 slaughter of up to a million Rwandan Tutsis by the majority Hutu tribe, and the West's catastrophic failure to intervene. But the fact that Hotel Rwanda addresses an important subject doesn't make it an important movie, or even a worthwhile one. In fact, the gravity of its subject matter only raises the cost of failure, transforming a mediocre movie into an offensively inadequate one.

The movie's fact-based story centers on Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), the manager of a posh hotel that caters mainly to European tourists. The movie quickly marks him as an operator, professionally required to play both sides of the fence: He slips a Rwandan general (Fana Mokoena) a bottle of his favorite Scotch, discourses with a U.N. official (Nick Nolte), then shows a couple of visiting journalists the ropes. Paul, a Hutu, knows that violence against the Tutsis is brewing, but he blinds himself to the situation. "Family is all that matters," he tells his wife (Sophie Okonedo), whose Tutsi lineage places Paul's family smack in the middle of the imminent conflict.

When the killing erupts, it does so without warning: The shots of Paul's neighbors being pulled from their houses recall the topsy-turvy opening of last year's Dawn of the Dead, a suburban idyll turned suddenly, irrevocably deadly. Searching for his wife in the dark, he finds a room full of Tutsis hiding from the killing, and just like that, Paul's family grows. Over the protests of Nolte's Col. Oliver, the United Nations pulls out, and the journalists flee to safety, but Paul stays behind, using the only asset at his disposal — the hotel — to house an ever-growing group of refugees.

Knowing the movie is based on fact (and, unofficially, on Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families), you can't help but feel profound respect for the real Paul Rusesabagina's courage and the resourcefulness that allowed more than 1,200 Rwandans to survive the escalating genocide. Cheadle's performance, to his credit, is unfailingly modest. He plays Paul as a man forced into heroism by horrendous circumstances and his own bedrock decency; he never treats Rusesabagina as a hero, even though he certainly merits the description.

Unfortunately, the rest of Hotel Rwanda doesn't have anything like the complexity of Cheadle's performance. Terry George and co-screenwriter Keir Pearson take every advantage to cast the U.N. and Western powers, including the U.S., as cartoon villains. "They're cowards, Paul," explains the hotel's Belgian owner (Jean Reno), while Oliver breaks down just how little Rwandan lives are worth: "The West, all the superpowers — they think you're dirt. You're not even a nigger. You're African."

It's an exceptionally ugly line, especially given the venom with which Nolte spits the last word, and it's inevitably cited (or more often paraphrased) by those who find the movie "damning" or "powerful." But while it's certainly fair to blame racism for Western indifference, it's also a cheap way of making the movie's audience feel superior — you can practically hear the invisible matrons behind you clucking their tongues and whispering, "How awful!" It's not enough for Joaquin Phoenix's TV cameraman to steal out of town when the fighting gets intense; he has to blurt out "I'm so ashamed," just in case we might think he has a right to protect his own life. Surely George knows that many journalists have been killed in similar situations, but their deaths don't serve his point.

Because movies like Hotel Rwanda move stories from the news to the entertainment section, because they boil historical complexities down to trite good-vs.-evil tales, and, mostly, because they're accompanied by extensive advertising campaigns — aimed, in the case of Hotel Rwanda, not just at increasing the movie's box-office take, but at securing Cheadle an Oscar nomination — they're treated as public-service announcements, informational vessels whose actual substance is close to irrelevant. The movie comes to equal its subject. "We know how little attention the West paid to the Rwandan genocide as it was occurring," wrote Salon's Charles Taylor in a particularly high-handed review. "The question now is, How much attention will be paid to this movie?"

With due respect to one of the few critics who rates The Dreamers as highly as I do, that's not even close to "the question." Paying heed to the Rwandan genocide 10 years after the fact — merely watching Hotel Rwanda doesn't count — isn't nearly good enough, especially when the movie all but ignores the catastrophe's lingering effects. If Hotel Rwanda does no more than occasion a spate of liberal breast-beating, then it is, by its own standards, an utter failure. The movie has obvious parallels to the current situation in Sudan, but those parallels don't exist within the world of the film, nor does it give any sense of the systemic deficiencies which, then as now, allow global catastrophes to progress unchecked.

In fact, there's no sense that such systems even exist, since in reductive TV-movie style, Hotel Rwanda condenses each relevant institution to a single figure: Nolte's colonel is the United Nations; Cara Seymour's aid worker is the Red Cross and so on. The characters are sufficiently generic to read as composites, and even if they weren't written as such, the awfulness of Nolte and Phoenix's performances would prevent their characters from taking on lives of their own. (Whose idea was it to give the mumble-mouthed Nolte the bulk of the movie's exposition?)

By contrast, we're encouraged to read Paul as a singular anomaly — the man who resisted violence. It's that individualist approach, so evident in the George-scripted In the Name of the Father, that leads Hotel Rwanda to chalk up the West's failure to what amount to defects of character — racism, cowardice — rather than addressing the fact that it's exactly the impersonal nature of government that allows individuals to escape responsibility. A certain amount of personification is inevitable in dramatic storytelling, but Hotel Rwanda makes no acknowledgement of its simplifications. Stanley Kubrick's criticism of Schindler's List holds even more true for Hotel Rwanda: "The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 people who don't." At least, for all its inspirational trappings, Schindler's List was honest about the limits of one man's power, to say nothing of one movie's.

One among hundreds of Holocaust narratives, Schindler's List could afford, like last year's Rosenstrasse, to tell an atypical story. Hotel Rwanda, fairly or not, bears the burden of its uniqueness. For all George's attempts to balance the story — a haunting scene where Paul stumbles upon a road clogged with dead bodies, a closing caption which memorializes the dead — the overall impression is a positive, "uplifting" one: Despite the West's failure to act, these people, at least, came out all right. "If people see this footage, they'll go, "Oh my God! That's horrible!' Then go on eating their dinner," quips Phoenix's journalist. Hotel Rwanda wants to ruin its audience's appetite, but it doesn't stick in the throat the way it should. In the end, it's only a movie.

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