Mesmerizing, Breathtaking

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2005)

Hotel Rwanda would have been a fantastic film without Don Cheadle; but his performance gives it so much. It's hard not to be reminded of Liam Neeson's portrayal of Oscar Schindler, but Hotel Rwanda has just the kind of human believability that Schindler's List lost quite quickly. Cheadle is touching, believable and inspiring in this role, and I for one am looking forward to seeing more of his work in the future. It's nice to see some famous faces popping in on Hotel Rwanda  Nick Nolte, Jean Reno, Joaquin Phoenix  but these are all cameo appearances, and it's the less familiar actors, Cheadle first and foremost, that give their whole and make it the fantastic experience that it is.
And yet, the actors aren't the focus of this film, or at least not all of it; Hotel Rwanda is practically a documentary, and excluding a few sentimental moments, it makes no dramatizations and no beautifications in presenting the horrors of the massacre in Rwanda. If at times the film seems to drive the message home a bit too forcefully  and it often does; Hotel Rwanda leaves very little to our interpretation, and that sometimes interferes with the drama: I had a bit of a problem with characters uttering lines that explain what we should have figured out for ourselves, like Joaquin Phoenix saying 'I'm so ashamed' to nobody in particular just after spending several minutes showing just how ashamed he is  it's all part of the director's intention. Hotel Rwanda doesn't make excuses for itself: it refuses to leave any viewer indifferent, and it refuses to let you twist its meaning. The message is so plain and strong that it cannot be ignored and overlooked. The film is just enough shockingly brutal to make sure that we get it. And we do; it's a depressing, powerful experience, which makes you as truly ashamed as Phoenix's character was of the kind of horrors human beings are capable of, and of your own inability to interfere.
Hotel Rwanda never had a shot at the Oscars  it's just too frank and too straightforward for the Academy to stomach. But it might just be the best movie made this year. At any rate it's an important film, a film that needs to be watched and demands every bit of your attention. It's a true masterpiece that will probably be remembered as a classic for many years to come.