As Powerful and Moving as "Schindler's List"

Rating: Null/10 (18 January 2005)

"Hotel Rwanda" masterfully humanizes the enormity of the Rwandan genocide by focusing on the sane humanity of one man and his family when the whole world around them has gone insane. It ranks with "Schindler's List" as a film and a statement of the potential for action when faced with man's inhumanity to man.
It is not just Don Cheadle's superb inhabitation of the real life hero Paul Rusesabagina that makes this film captivating. Co-writers Keir Pearson and director Terry George (who has previously shown through Irish films his understanding of fratricidal civil war engendered by colonialism) do more than guide us step-by-step through the facts of a few horrific days in 1994.
We also see the transformation of a man who had benefited in an ironic oasis of a four-star Belgian tourist resort as a proud Hutu accomodationist to elitism, corruption and racism. Less a docudrama like "Bloody Sunday," this is gripping story telling of personal relationships, quick thinking and moral responsibility.
The film is not only edge of your seat suspense on the roller coaster of events to know what happens next to people we get to know (Sophie Okonedo has magical chemistry with Cheadle in portraying his spirited Tutsi wife) but also full of the humor, pathos and individuality of human foibles and emotions.
The wider background to the situation is explained very quickly in passing to a photojournalist moved to care, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as a legacy of racist Belgian rule that sounds like the plot of a classic episode from the original "Star Trek," so is even the more shocking for being true.
We've seen before the agonizing futility of "the whole world is watching" hope in films going back to "Ship of Fools," here painfully racist as well, and we've seen films about incomprehensible African strife through the eyes of sympathetic white witnesses that come across like "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Revelatory are how the African vs. African tensions are demonstrated, not only the culminating tsunami of violence (the visual gore is minimized such that seeing dead bodies, particularly of children, to the horizon is effectively stomach-turning enough so we don't need to see close-ups of machete wounds), but we are caught up in the build-up to the tensions, the humiliating negotiations to try and maintain civilized behavior, the class clashes, tribal treachery, and the specter of future repercussions, all scarily recreated.
The U.N. peacekeepers, represented by Nick Nolte, are presented more positively, and not as helpless, as their bitter depiction in Yugoslavia in as "No Man's Land." The ever-present ranting radio, whose managers have been accused of war crimes, is a frighteningly heard presence in orchestrating the horror.
The closing song, "Million Voices" by Wyclef Jean, sounds quite much like Peter Gabriel's tributes to Stephen Biko and Nelson Mandela, but the Afro Celt Sound System's score well exemplifies the movie's theme of a bitter tragedy for African and European cultures.