Well-told story of genocide in our time

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2006)

Paul Rusesabagina is Hutu. We see the word on his passport. His wife is Tutsi. She is in mortal danger. But Paul doesn't realize it yet. He believes that the violence threatened by the ruling Hutu against the once ruling Tutsi in Rwanda will not happen because the UN peacekeepers will not allow it, nor will the world stand by and watch the slaughter.
Paul manages a luxury hotel. He is a worldly-wise, efficient, suavely diplomatic man who dresses impeccably and who knows how to influence people with well-chosen gifts and flattery. His demeanor is calm and measured. He tells his driver that to give a government official or some other important person ten thousand francs is not as effective as giving him a rare Cuban cigar worth the same amount.
He visits a supplier to gain supplies for the hotel. While he is there a crate containing hundreds of machetes overturns. He is told they come from China at a cost of ten cents each and can be sold for many times that amount.
This is the first hint of the horror to come, and the way it is revealed is characteristic of director Terry George's calculated method. He has a story of genocide to tell, a story of criminal neglect by the West, especially by the United States under President Clinton who stood aside and allowed the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people to take place, as did the rest of the world through the UN. The next hint comes from government radio in which the Tutsi people are referred to as "cockroaches." This is most chilling because when one tribe or nation sets out to kill the people of another tribe or nation the essential element is to turn those people into something less than humans. The psychological trick is to make the killers believe they are killing vermin. One cannot help but recall the Nazi propaganda machine and its methods prior to and during the Holocaust.
Next we see in a scene at the hotel bar that it is really impossible to tell by appearance the difference between two young women, one Tutsi and the other Hutu. The Tutsi are said to be tall and to look down their noses at the Hutu who are said to be shorter and perhaps darker, but this is clearly a fiction. Even so, racial differences are invented and racism is inculcated into the mass mind. All of this is necessary because the slaughter is to take place using not bullets or gas chambers, but instead the cheap machetes from China. To get armies of young men to kill their neighbors and fellow countrymen, women and children with machetes requires the stirring up of a mass hatred of epic proportion and demonic intensity.
The personal story itself within this greater scenario is that of Paul and his family and how he was persuaded by a moral imperative that he himself felt to save hundreds of Tutsi by housing them in the luxury hotel he managed after the Europeans left. We see how he risked his life and family and how his courage and resourcefulness proved heroic. Terry George tells the story in a straightforward manner with vivid and deliberate detail. In particular there are scenes of carnage on a vast scale, including the chilling horror of the nighttime bumpy ride along the "river road" which was said by George Rutaganda, a sadistic man, to be "open" and the preferred route to take back to the hotel. The bumps in the road were the bodies of recently slaughtered Tutsi that the hotel van could not help but drive over.
The acting by Don Cheadle as Paul and by Sophie Okonedo who played his wife is outstanding. Nick Notle is effective in the role of a compromised and nearly helpless UN commander.
This is a message film. The message goes out to the whole world, and Terry George makes us understand that those people who were slaughtered could be people anywhere, in particular they could be middle class Americans or Europeans. He indicates that Western prejudice against black Africans in part allowed the slaughter to take place. By showing us the ordinary domestic life of Paul and his family at home, their love and affection for one another--their familiar humanity--we are made to share this horrific human tragedy and to realize that we could have prevented it had we only known or cared enough.
Will we care enough next time?--and there will be a next time, and a time after that and then another until such a day comes when the rule of law prevails internationally and people everywhere understand that we are all essentially the same and that the baser nature of our leaders must be controlled by law and justice.
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