Ambitious, successful TV-docudrama.

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2006)

The story is familiar enough in its outline that I'll pretty much skip it. Basically, Don Cheadle's character, a hotel manager in Rwanda during the genocide, manages to save most of his family and more than a thousand Hutus who would otherwise have become victims in the slaughter.
It's sometimes reminiscent of parts of "The Killing Fields" and "Salvador," but it's more modestly done. No grand, sweeping shots of ten thousand extras; no repetitive shots of machetes hacking up innocent people. It's the story of one ordinary -- well, maybe extraordinary -- guy who wheedles, bribes, and blackmails until he gets his charges out into neighboring Tanzania.
Yet, though we see little of it, the horror hangs palpably in the atmosphere. Cheadle's character is driving a van full of supplies back to his hotel in the middle of the night and the van begins to bump and lurch on a suddenly rough road. Cheadle gets out and discovers he's been driving over piles of corpses which cover the road as far ahead as he can see.
The UN forces are present but almost (not quite) impotent. I lost track of who was doing all the killing -- there is the army, the rebels, various factions -- it hardly matters. The Hutus are killing the Tutsi children so as to wipe out the next generation. It's difficult to tell how this differs much from the Serbs raping rival women in order to impregnate them and produce a next generation that is at least half-Serbian.
Perhaps half a million people were killed in Rwanda in 1994. The rivers and waterfalls were choked with naked and mutilated bodies. And little attention was paid by most of us, just as there is little attention being paid to events in Darfur as I write this. Our general view of human nature is that we are flawed but perfectible. Maybe we're just flawed. Maybe what we need is a signal of surrender, the kind dogs have, in which the loser rolls over on his back and the victor straddles him, looks around, and growls. Alas we have no such signal. The hand of the Intelligent Designer shook.
Cheadle's performance is better than just good. He's VERY good. He darts about wearing the same expression, wheeling and dealing, being reasonable, until we think that's all there is to him. Until there is a scene with a corrupt general who swigs out of a bottle of single malt scotch and muses about his visit to Scotland. "Good golf. I wonder if I will ever visit there again. Do you think so?" Cheadle, meanwhile, sweat pouring down his face, has been frantically stacking bottles of scotch in a crate to bribe the general, paying no attention, and he replies unthinkingly, "No," then looks up and adds quickly, "I mean there are many things I believe we should all do in the future." The scene ends with Cheadle's man who embraces realpolitik finally losing his temper and shouting wide-eyed at the general that some day there will be an accounting for all this and who, if not Cheadle, will be around to testify for the general. The transformation of the character from polite and subservient to angry and threatening is shocking. And it is hard to believe that Cheadle could have been one of the undercover Narcs in "Traffic." He's exceptional.
His wife, Sophie Okonedo, is compellingly beautiful in a most ordinary kind of way with her plump pouting lips, her Egyptian eyes, and her narrow-shouldered vulnerable frame.
But, really, all the performances are pretty good. If there were a temptation to turn the white folks into villains, it was successfully resisted. I'm not sure -- I'll have to look it up later -- but I don't believe the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu was created by European colonials. Probably the measurements and all that took place, and perhaps the laying on of hands ceremony, but if I remember the Hutu and Tutsi spoke different languages and were of different somatotypes to begin with. Not that it matters much.
The movie is both gripping and instructive. A great candidate for showing in classes on international affairs and social change. Throw it into a philosophy class while you're at it. Let's see what they make out of human nature.