Hotel Rwanda
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Movie Reviews of Hotel Rwanda
Movie Review: Incredibly affecting, but don't expect a documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
While it was easily one of the best movies in a slow year last year, Hotel Rwanda was just as easily among the most frightening. The prevailing storyline may be a moving and inspiring, but it takes place against the backdrop of some of the most horrific events in recent memory. In a manner reminiscent of Schindler's List and The Pianist, Hotel Rwanda uses its story to shed a stark light on one of those instances where the unthinkable happens, namely the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Fuelled by decades-old tribal hatred stemming from the days of Belgian colonization, and enabled by the fear and indifference of a Western world still reeling from the then-recent disaster in Somalia, that year the majority Hutus unleashed a paroxysm of violence against the country's Tutsi minority, killing nearly a million men, women, and children in a period of barely three months. While ethnic and tribal clashes are nothing new-witness Israel, Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia-the convergence of factors in this case seemed especially combustible, a fact to which the staggering body count certainly attested.
Exploring the genocide mostly through the eyes of one man, the movie seeks to find redemption among horror by illustrating a single instance of the best of human nature in the midst of an explosion of the worst. Don Cheadle has a tall order in filling the role of real-life protagonist Paul Rusesabagina, but he manages to bring equal amounts of passion and nuance to a role that demands both. For those who don't know by now, Rusesabagina was the Hutu manager of the prestigious Hotel Milles Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, a hotel that literally became a refugee camp when over a thousand people sought shelter there from the guns and machetes of the rampaging Hutu milita. The movie wisely portrays Paul as less a born hero than one who had heroism thrust upon him, as the narrative sees him emerge from a consumnate businessman concerned with himself and his family (his wife was a Tutsi) to the savior of hundreds, both Hutu and Tutsi alike. While it should go without saying that Hotel Rwanda is a dramatization and therefore not entirely factual per se, the portrayal of its hero is never less than believable.
The violence is largely implied, rather than explicit-there's nothing to match the most cringe-inducing scenes in Schindler's List or The Pianist-but the film more than succeeds in capturing the sheer terror of what was occurring. This is never more true than in perhaps the film's most harrowing scene, when a minor fender bender lands Paul and a villainous employee in a clearing-turned-slaughterhouse, and Paul gets out of his van to the sight of corpses strewn out literally as far as the eye can see. There's no action or dialogue, but the harsh reality of senseless massacre is still put on the sharpest possible display. Even more than the violence itself, though, the dehumanization necessary to murder on such a massive scale manages to terrify: much like the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking, the Rwandan genocide was spurred by a belief that the enemy was completely outside the bounds of normal human decency. Alternately referring to the Tutsis as traitors and "cockroaches," the Hutus were able to justify their indiscriminate butchering of civilians with the time-honored devices of scapegoating and projection, which are ultimately the backing for pretty much all such atrocities.
The movie also conveys yet another sad reality of human nature with its implications of the widespread apathy that greeted news of the atrocities in the Western world. Granted, many countries were in no mood for foreign entanglements in the wake of the bungling of the humanitarian crisis in Somalia (including the deaths of 18 American soldiers vividly depicted in Black Hawk Down), but in light of the occcurrences in Rwanda the refusal to intervene shown by the so-called international community was still shocking. Unfortunately, Western governments were concerned primarily with protecting their own, as the movie bitterly demonstrates when the United Nations peackeeping forces aren't allowed to evacuate anyone from Kigali but foreign nationals. Of course, people everywhere tend to be concerned primarily with their own-their families, their friends, their countrymen-so the tragedies of Rwanda ultimately aren't all that surprising. The impotence of the UN is brought into especially sharp relief through the well-meaning Canadian colonel played in career-reviving fashion by Nick Nolte, whose good intentions are outweighed by his inability to do much of anything to stop the rampant bloodshed. It's not at all surprising to see Paul quickly reduced to bribery and bargaining with the Rwandan army and Hutu militia to keep his charges alive. While there are some moments of odd poignancy and even dark humor to be found here, for the most part Hotel Rwanda is a depressing (if still necessary) watch largely because it illuminates the aspects of our nature that we don't often acknowledge. Ignorance and insularity are realities of life in the U.S. these days (we're at war with Iraq right now, but how many Americans have been there or even know what countries border it?), and Hotel Rwanda is clearly intended to reflect those realities back at its viewers.
Now, before I take my leave of this overly long review, it should be noted that Hotel Rwanda tells only a small part of the story of Rwanda, and it's a fictionalized part at that. Watching it doesn't substitute for reading about the events themselves and what they can tell us, so you shouldn't expect it to (which is also why so many of the criticisms I've seen of this movie on this site are off base; people seem to be knocking it for not being something it's not supposed to be). However, if this movie manages to stimulate some thought and discussion, all the better. Whatever the case, though, it's certainly a brilliant movie in its own right, filled with powerful imagery, moral indignation, and Cheadle's captivating acting. And if you do feel like reading up about the Rwandan genocide, may I suggest Scott Peterson(no, not the murderer)'s gripping book Me Against My Brother.
Movie Review: A Film for Many Others to Reflect
Summary: 5 Stars
Hotel Rwanda is a movie that is emotional and moving, displaying how one hotel manager has a human heart in saving many others' lives when UN abandoned the country to permit violence occurring in Rwanda.
I agree to the other reviewers of the movie regarding the current phenomenon of our society, lacking concerns about the violence happened outside of their own countries. We read the newspapers we watch TV news. We have dinner and these violence displays in front of our eyes. Yet, we keep on eating our dinner and says, "It is too bad things happened. It is sad." And then we keep moving on with our lives, hoping someone else will take charge of it.
I find it ironic with the emotionless expression our TV reporters in the news. We human beings hope some powerful world leaders (like the President of the United States) would have intervened such cruelty for human justice yet, nothing was done. It is often when violence hit home, can we truly relate how devastating people's life situations are. It is only incidents such as 911 hits home hard that wakes Americans up, learning and realizing how painful an episode is when violence hit their home country. Yet, these tragedies happened in other societies in a consistent basis. It is a shame that the governments continue pursuing their own foreign interest by invading Iraq, claiming, and lumping the war with Iraq as the war of terror creating more excuses for wars, more violence than creating world peace.
We hear suicide bombings in the Israel. We hear violence between the tribes in many of the African countries. We hear the war of terror and we hear the war with Iraq. We hear violence all over the world. However, people who live in the United States of America shut their ears up and not hearing how painful lives are in other countries. People are so self-absorbed about their little own life issues (such as getting the next higher paid jobs, nicer cars, finer food, bigger houses...) while somebody who lives somewhere else is looking for ways to survive, looking for places to shelter themselves and their children.
I questioned, "How can people have so much hatred towards each other? Is it necessary? Why can't we find peace? Why do we have to fight? Why do we have to win at the expense of others' lives, sometimes the innocence's lives?" If world peace is my quest, many Americans' quest, how come the leaders, politicians of the most supposedly democratic country, United States of America, have done nothing? Americans vote these individuals to become the leaders of this society. Americans vote these individuals to represent, carry out Americans' decisions, dreams. Is this a sign that the democratic system failed in the modern American society? How come President George W. Bush never listen many of the Americans who are against the war in Iraq, which ultimately creates only more violence and tragedies? How come the American government spends billions of dollars funding the war in Iraq, while maybe a fraction of this money can be spent on world peace, creating a better world for humanity? A fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq could have spent in stopping violence similar to the massacre of Rwanda. Yet, the average Joe of the American society has no power to vote the between the options of world peace versus creating violence in other countries.
How come the leaders of the super-power countries are so self-absorbed, self-aloof, allowing, permitting such cruelty and violence happening to some other people, yet pouring resources funding more violence, expensing more young Americans' lives in a war with Iraq? Here are the many questions I could never understand nor I feel I have control around answering these questions. Maybe I am being overly critical to the current American government, the current democratic system. Maybe the American government has done the best they can to run this country and to keep world peace. But if the government have done the best they can, why we still hear soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq? If the government is trying hard to keep world peace, why did they delude the society that was a war of terror while they could not find any solid evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? If the government is trying hard to keep world peace, why did they jump into a hasty decision going to war in Iraq?
Only if there are more awareness and effort put in world peace, educating people the importance of choosing peace versus violence, can we find the world a better place to live. Only when human beings start putting more importance around world peace versus funding the inadequate self-interest of some politicians have, can this world be a safer place to live. Only when we all have this sense of awareness and put world peace as a priority, can we prevent violence happened in Rwanda to re-appear in other countries.
Movie Review: Well-told story of genocide in our time
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Movie Review: A memorable performance in an unforgettable horror story
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1994 when Rwanda descended into the bloody madness of genocide Paul Ruseasabagina (Don Cheadle) was reasonably secure in his process. He belonged to the Hutu majority that was slaughtering the minority with machetes and he was the manger of the five-star Hotel Milles Collines in Kigali. But his wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo), is Tutsi and the Tutsi are not only being called "cockroaches" on the nonstop incendiary radio broadcasts they are being exterminated like them. Not only are his wife and children in danger, so is the rest of his family and so are the guests in his hotel. It is up to Ruseasabagina to do something about this madness simply because there is nobody else to do the job (it would be easier to call the character Paul, but given the story it seems important to focus on the fact he was an African).
"Hotel Rwanda" is a true story, and even though we know going in that Ruseasabagina is going to save over a thousand refugees this is still a harrowing story. For the most part the genocide happens outside the walls of the hotel, but there are enough scenes and stories of what is happening to make it clear that the people huddled in the hotel are in mortal danger. What is probably the most unforgettable moment comes while a van is being driven through the fog and appears to have gone off the road (the DVD extras also contain scenes of the unforgettable way the Tutsi have memorialized the victims of the slaughter at one location).
The explanation for why the United Nations, the Europeans, the Americans, or anybody else with a speck of humanity in them does not intervene to stop the genocide is articulated by the Colonel Oliver character played by Nick Nolte, who tells Ruseasabagina that the problem is that these are just black Africans killing other black Africans. The words are spoken in disgust and are brutal, but they are horribly true and what redeems Oliver is not only that is he is willing to articulate the brutal truth but that there will come a point where orders to stand by and do nothing are no longer going to be obeyed. Likewise, the cameraman played by Joaquin Phoenix provides a memorable scene as the Europeans leave the Milles Collines and the character is so shamed not only by the retreat but also by the presence of a hotel employee holding an umbrella over their heads in the pouring rain.
But there is one person who cannot turn his back on what is happening. Ruseasabagina is literally the right person in the right place, because only the hotel could have become a refuge for the Tutsi and only the manager of a five-star hotel could have known exactly how to placate the military men leading the massacre. Not only does he speak their language, there is a sense in which they want to speak his as well, showing that even though their arms are covered in blood they can play the role of a civilized man. Cheadle's performance, deservedly nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, is appropriately controlled just as Ruseasabagina had to be in persuading these thugs to help him. He cracks only once when a mundane part of his preparing for his job suddenly becomes an impossibility to manage. He is also a hero who is flawed, making mistakes and trying desperately to do the right thing, even if that means forcing his wife to make a fateful promise or abandoning his family to try and save others.
There is an obvious comparison to be made between "Hotel Rwanda" and "Schindler's List." But watching this 2004 film I could not help thinking that if during the Holocaust there had been images of Nazis herding Jews into the concentration camps on the nightly news nobody would have done anything either (but if a whale is trapped in an ice flow in the arctic a rescue mission shall be sent). Stories such as this emphasize the small number doing good against the large number doing evil, but there is always that even larger number signifying all the people who do nothing and assent to the evil by their silence. Those who watch "Hotel Rwanda" will find themselves counted among that final number and should well remember that even if they were oblivious to what happened in Rwanda history will repeat itself is this regard and give us another chance to do the right thing.
Movie Review: How One Man Made a Difference
Summary: 5 Stars
What the "Hotel Rwanda" is can be argued, but what cannot be dismissed is the power of this two hour movie about how one man can make a difference.
Is "Hotel Rwanda" a story about internal, contrived politics destroying a country? Or it is dealing with how those in wealthier, more established countries prefer to pretend such trouble does not exist, that they need not become involved?
Is it about two very similar people groups killing each other? Could the movie be a reminder of how the systemic killing of a people group can happen today, that the evil of the Jewish Holocaust is not unique to the 1940s?
At first glance, "Hotel Rwanda" might look like a condemnation against the West's unwillingness to respond to an absolute carnage of genocidal hate. For some, they might see Bill Clinton, or the United Nations as impotent figures in this tragedy of humanity. They are easy figures to pick on, depending on the audience's personal politics, and the fact of who was in office at the time.
For me, the tremendous strength of the movie was one man's valor, of hotel manager's Paul Rusesabagina humble commitment to do the right thing, even though the world around him was chaotically destroying itself.
The plot is simple: two of Rwanda's people groups, the Hutus and Tutsis, are killing each other. Mostly, it was Hutu extremists trying to exterminate the Tutsis. A hotel becomes an ad hoc refugee camp, deftly managed by a man who preferred to be anywhere else. Can the hotel remain safe? Will the people hiding there survive?
Don Cheadle, perhaps best known for his portrayal as Sammy Davis Jr. in 1998's "The Rat Pack," is hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina.
Rusesabagina was just a businessman, the manager of the Belgian-owned Mille Collines, a top hotel in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. He worked hard to raise his family, and tried to keep politically neutral. When he saw neighbors killed, he kept his head low. When he brings in neighbors to be sheltered in the hotel, he still fights to retain his neutrality. However, when refugees start coming to the hotel by the dozens, he begins a new mission as the shepherd of a displaced people.
The bulk of the movie is shot within the hotel. Rusesabagina struggles to manage the appearance of a top quality hotel, since this image helps gird them against attacks. Bribes of money and liquor provide him with more protection, as do desperate calls from some 'guests' to their powerful connections outside of Rwanda.
When the camera takes us outside, we see awful scenes of gang-style killings. Although the Hutus and Tutsis aren't Bloods, Crips, Vice Lords or Latin Kings, but instead, are arbitrarily designated cultural groups, the murders are the same. Just as in any Chicago, New York or Los Angeles gangland war, the precise reasons for the constant violence are loosely based on dictatorial leadership, bigotry and bloodlust.
Listing the scenes which sank my heart is impossible. Singularly difficult to watch was the body-strewn road where Rusesabagina was driving.
"Hotel Rwanda" is not a movie to bring a young family. Like "The Passion of the Christ" and "Schindler's List," it has the kind of violence which is shown to remind us of the reality of the events being presented. Like in those movies, the audience I sat with sat stunned while the final credits rolled.
Like "Schindler's List," the antihero's commitment is the redemption of the story. Although 1 million "corpses were left behind," we see that although many men succumb to evil, not all do. Just as Oskar Schindler could not save every Jew, nor could Paul Rusesabagina save every Rwandan. But, just as Schindler helped a few, Rusesabagina also protected those he could.
Director Terry George might have chosen to dwell on what wasn't happening, and make this a political movie ala Michael Moore. He took the higher road, and tells a story of hope in the middle of a holocaust. I fully recommend "Hotel Rwanda." If the movie impacts you, please consider supporting relief efforts that continue in Kigali today.
Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com