Timely and occasionally quite powerful, Terry George’s “Hotel Rwanda” somehow stops short of being truly moving. Although it tells a personal story of survival during the mid-1990s massacres in Rwanda, it’s never quite personal enough.
This is not the fault of Don Cheadle, who gives his richest, most detailed performance to date as Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwanda hotel manager who saved more than 1200 people by sheltering them at the Hotel Milles Collines, deep in the heart of the dangerous Kigali province. The movie is at its most effective when it sees the unfolding disaster through his eyes.
Cheadle focuses on Paul’s gradual awareness of the enormity of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan citizens, many of them demonized as “cockroaches” by the men with machetes who butchered them. Encouraged by vicious radio propaganda, the Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The parallels with the recent Sudan crisis need not be spelled out.
In the most horrific scene, Paul is surrounded by fog and finds himself driving over the corpses of men, women and children. Not until he emerges from his van does he realize what’s been impeding his progress. Bloodied by the mutilated bodies he touches, he goes back to the hotel, cleans up, tries to put on fresh clothes. Then he rips off his shirt and tie, falls to the floor and dissolves in tears.
As an expression of rage and frustration, it’s an extraordinary moment, and a necessary one for the audience as well as Paul. Cheadle throws himself into it, never holding back; his unity with the character seems complete. He captures not only Paul’s grief but his heroism, his cunning and his necessarily cool management style.
If Paul’s role in this tragedy sometimes suggests Oskar Schindler in “Schindler’s List,” the Hotel Milles Collines frequently resembles Humphrey Bogart’s Café Americain in “Casablanca.” Paul even hopes that something equivalent to the “letters of transit,” those magical visas that were meant to save Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, will salvage him, his family and the people he’s trying to rescue.
Unfortunately, the colorful parade of characters in “Casablanca” is missing. Joaquin Phoenix (as a photojournalist) and Nick Nolte (as a United Nations peacekeeper) try to make their brief scenes count, but mostly they just call attention to their celebrity status. Rarely does “Hotel Rwanda” stop for a moment of comic or musical relief that might bind us closer to the characters. Most scenes stick to a simple agenda or repeat what we already know.
This was also true of George’s previous movies: “Some Mother’s Son,” about an IRA hunger strike, and “A Bright Shining Lie,” about an American advisor who turned against the Vietnam war. Both were closely based on true stories, both did a straightforward job of telling those stories, and both fell just short of achieving complete involvement.
“Hotel Rwanda” is further hampered by its failure to suggest exactly what led to this catastrophe. The conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis goes back several centuries, and few news reports have bothered to explain it. But a two-hour movie might be expected at least to try.