Bribery

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2010)

There is a certain sadness, a certainty of sadness in stories like this, and the movies that tell them.
It reduces to us being made to care for a very few souls and then celebrate when our chosen people escape the fate of many others around them. The cost of this dynamic is straightforward: we have to make the others die, often horribly. It is a cheap sort of drama, the cheapest, the basest. It dehumanizes us because we become complicit in dehumanizing those that are sacrificed so that we can have a perhaps challenging but comfortable theater experience.
We'll see it in blockbuster movies, when some alien invasion or natural event kills millions (or billions) but we follow a few that escape. We'll even see it in the shootouts of ordinary magical gun movies where the others drop one per shot while our guy wondrously and gracefully kills.
But in this case, the tragedy is real. It really happened: a million people killed in as much time as a summer vacation: killed by neighbors with machetes. A million people killed because we stood by. The film does make a very central point, but not clearly enough. There are two warring tribes here, Hutu and Tutsi. But genetically they are identical. They speak the same language and culturally are the same. The difference? Belgium race theorists created the difference so that they could turn over the country to those they believed genetically superior, and that superiority determined by body and facial proportions. The accursed "golden mean." (The distinction until then was one of class.)
We do have Nick Nolte in the role of Privileged-Non-African-on-the-Spot. Joaquin Phoenix as a reporter supplements his role. They have the task of letting us know these facts and also that the genocide was easily preventable if a few troops had been sent in, which could have happened but for French and Belgian obstruction. No more than ten bureaucrats in Europe — whose names we know — killed a million while the local church helped.
With that sad background, we have a hard time celebrating the survival of our hero and those he saves. This is made harder because the drama is poorly constructed and executed. It not enough that the wife be a good soul, or that the hotel manager be resourceful, or that many cliffhanger episodes are pulled back from near disaster. It is not enough that two little girls are found at the last minute and whisked to an adjacent country with laws and safety. It is not enough. It almost is not anything.
The camera could have been used. We know how to do that. We had a camera on screen in a ready role. There could easily have been the power of effective cinema brought to this event, this reportage,
When you make a film that involves political events so significant, you take a responsibility. I'm on the fence as to whether the history has to be factually correct. But you have to allow them to matter. Because they do. They do.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.