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Hotel Rwanda
Of all the films included in this year's Oscar nominations, Hotel Rwanda is the crudest in strictly aesthetic terms. It is also the most powerful. It is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Milles Collines, a swanky Belgian-owned hotel in Kigali. As played by Don Cheadle, Paul is a smooth operator, a natural diplomat who has worked his way to this position of authority by knowing which hands to shake and which palms to grease. But he's an honourable man, kind and fair. A Hutu married to a Tutsi (Sophie Okonedo), he refuses to believe that the tensions between the two warring tribes will not be fixed by the UN-brokered peace treaty. 
In this he is tragically mistaken. As Terry George's film reminds us, a million Tutsis were slaughtered over the 100 days which followed that accord, while the UN peacekeepers stood by and watched. That figure would have been even higher, were it not for Rusesabagina's courageous efforts to shelter 1200 of his countrymen from the machetes of their friends and neighbours in the precarious sanctuary of the Milles Collines. An Irish Republican who wrote the screenplays for In the Name of the Father and The Boxer, and who directed Some Mother's Son, Terry George is a political animal, and he's careful to load the early scenes with enough information to explain the background to the conflict. These scenes are not always pretty, but George was surely right to assume his audience would need them. The film is mostly confined to the hotel, yet such is the subtlety and restraint of Don Cheadle's performance, a scene in which he breaks down, trying to change a bloody shirt and tie his tie, conveys the horror of the situation as vividly as 100 explicit killings might have. 
With anarchy all around him, Paul bluffs the agents of chaos by maintaining the facade of civilisation. As long as the hotel is running business as usual, then no-one quite musters the nerve to bespoil Western property. His saddest betrayal is the painful realisation of just how hollow this charade really is, when the Western powers wash their hands of the country. 'How can they not intervene when they see such atrocities?' he demands of Joaquin Phoenix's TV cameraman. 'I think if people see this footage, they'll say "Oh my god, that's terrible", and then they'll go on eating their dinners,' Phoenix replies. Of course that reaction is equally true for most of us watching Hotel Rwanda 10 years after the fact. It is impossible not to be moved by this film, especially by Cheadle's dignified portrayal of true heroism, and by Okenedo, extraordinary as his wife. Whether that compassion might extend into political action on behalf of the victims of war in Sudan, for example, is another story. Tom Charity 
More information about Hotel Rwanda » Critics' Reviews
Radio Times
Oscar-nominated Don Cheadle delivers the performance of his career in this gut-wrenching drama based on events in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. Dubbed “Africa's Schindler's List” by US critics, it's an inspirational and shame-inducing story of one man's courage in the face of genuine horror. In a brilliantly complex turn, Cheadle plays true-life hero Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who saved the lives of more than 1200 refugees — the majority of them Tutsi — by sheltering them at his workplace. Cleanly shot with an acute sense of realism, the film focuses on the emotional interaction between its characters as they struggle to survive despite appalling indifference from the West. By homing in on just one element of the Hutu campaign of genocide, co-writer/director Terry George gives a human face to the shocking statistics, while his simple, straightforward style emphasises the chilling casualness of the violence. Occasionally there's a sense of unnecessary manipulation, but it's quickly forgotten in a picture of genuine weight and power.
Leading performances give vitality and emotion to an underpowered version of a true story about a brave man; while admirable for its focus on an appalling, soon forgotten moment in recent history, the film fails to provide a wider context for its tale of Time Out A decade since tribal extremists in Rwanda organised a blitzkrieg of ethnic killing while the world minced its words,... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
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