REVIEWED - HOTEL RWANDA: Hotel Rwanda captures the hell of genocide, writes Michael Dwyer
Words cannot adequately describe the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when, over the course of 100 days, Hutu extremists massacred more than a million of their Tutsi neighbours, and the rest of the world looked away. Images, as powerfully recreated in Hotel Rwanda, go a long way towards capturing the climate of fear, prejudice and slaughter that persisted over those bloody months.
Devising a framework to confront this horror, director Terry George and his screenwriting collaborator Keir Pearson chose not to view these events through the eyes of a white observer - the cynical TV news cameraman played in the film by Joaquin Phoenix, or the ineffectual United Nations colonel played by Nick Nolte, although both have significant functions in the drama. The cameraman observes that audiences around the world will view his footage, say it's shocking and get on with eating their dinner, and the colonel emphasises that he is a peacekeeper, not a peacemaker.
Instead, the potent dramatic filter of the narrative is a Hutu hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), whose wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo) is a Tutsi, and the factually based film concerns his unstinting efforts to shelter and save 1,200 refugees inside the Belgian-owned Kigali hotel. At first, Rusesabagina naively believes that the presence of UN personnel and the world media, and the signing of a peace agreement, will all contribute to bringing an early peace. But as the Hutu radio station pours out incendiary, venom-steeped propaganda against the Tutsis it dismisses as "cockroaches", the body count soars.
Played with conviction and crucial charisma by Cheadle, Rusesabagina has to draw on all the skills he has honed as a hotel manager - tact and organisational flair, his recourse to cajoling, flattery and bribery, and calling in all the favours he has accumulated down the years. In the eye of the storm, he struggles to appear calm and optimistic, and to hide his inner desperation.
A regularly underestimated actor, Cheadle strikes an unforgettable screen presence, matched by Okonedo as his wife, in this gripping film permeated by a gnawing tension.
Marking a highly assured leap forward as a film-maker for George from his 1996 debut feature, Some Mother's Son, Hotel Rwanda vividly establishes its political and social contexts, and it is admirably lucid in its picture of the escalating conflict and of the bitter hatred harboured by the Hutus for their Tutsi neighbours. Although never didactic, it offers several salutary lessons for today's world.
