Yes, You Can Enjoy a Film about Genocide

Rating: 8/10 (20 July 2006)

Like a lot of viewers, I suspect, I avoided "Hotel Rwanda" for a long time because I feared watching a film about genocide.
My avoidance was unnecessary. "Hotel Rwanda" is a fine film. It is exciting, and inspirational, and it contains some great performances. It does not dwell on the horror of genocide.
Don Cheadle is terrific as Paur Rusesabagina, a hotel worker who helps save the lives of over a thousand refugees from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Cheadle has the kind of star power and charisma that Golden Age stars like Jimmy Cagney possessed. I hope to see his career flourish, and to see him in more dramatically exciting and intellectually and morally challenging films like this one.
The film moves at a fast clip, and hints at the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide without rubbing the viewer's nose in those horrors. The plot is structured in such a way as to give the viewer necessary moments of humor, excitement, suspense, and tearful release. This really feels like a *movie,* not a documentary or a sermon.
There were a few flaws in the movie, that did not diminish its quality.
Nick Nolte plays a distorted version of the Canadian UN Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, author of the genocide memoir, "Shake Hands with the Devil." Dallaire has complained publicly about Nolte's performance, and he has a right to. In a downright embarrassing scene, a hammishly overacting Nolte, lips aquiver, tells Paul that the reason the Rwandan genocide is happening is that the West regards Africans as -- and here, Nolte uses the N word.
This scene is simply false. Westerners did not orchestrate the Rwandan genocide. The killers must take responsibility for their killing. The West has been criticized for not stopping the genocide, often by people who decline to mention that the Rwandan genocide took place over, roughly, a hundred days, at a faster rate than the Nazi holocaust, during which almost a million people were killed, largely by their own neighbors, by machete, in a landlocked African country called "the land of a thousand hills." The logistical problems presented by the above situation were all but impossible to overcome. Further, many people, including leftists, were burnt out on "humanitarian" military intervention, in the wake of Somalia. (George Bush's war in Iraq will similarly impact future assessments of the advisability of "humanitarian" military intervention by one country in a distant, and badly understood, country's internal affairs.) Too, "Hotel Rwanda," in underplaying the genocide, and making itself an easier film to watch, failed to communicate the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Some viewers will feel grateful for this; others might not.
In general, though, "Hotel Rwanda" is a fine film featuring, in Don Cheadle, a megawatt star doing his best work.