Hotel Rwanda

(Herald rating: ***)


The geopolitical thriller that narrates events through the eyes of an individual is a problematic genre. A good movie has to be a story about an individual, particularly if it is to reach a wide audience, but there is something distasteful about any film covering a genocide (Schindler's List springs to mind) whose narrative arc heads remorselessly for a happy ending.

Though undeniably wrenching and driven by a central performance of subtlety and grace, Hotel Rwanda is ultimately a simple-minded and slightly sentimental take on the appalling events of mid-1994. In barely 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by members of the Hutu tribe in one of history's worst outbursts of ethnic savagery. At one point a news cameraman, played by Joaquin Phoenix, dismisses the likely impact of his footage. Prime-time audiences, he shrugs, "will say, 'Oh my God, that's terrible' and they'll go on eating their dinners".

Nick Nolte, as an honest but helpless UN-forces officer, spits out a bitter monologue about how the world won't come to the aid of Rwanda because their people are black "and you ain't even niggers - you're African".

It's an index of the film's serious-mindedness that it alludes to these matters at all. Its director and co-writer Terry George, who wrote In the Name of the Father, cannot be blamed for passing lightly over the conflict's roots. Yet what remains is the impression of the bloodbath as an outbreak of mass hysteria performed by gibbering loons possessed by some arcane magic. This has the bonus of further ennobling the main character, but it limits the film's conceptual reach and, ultimately, its impact.

Paul Rusesabagina (Cheadle) is a real person, now living in Belgium, who helped with the script and it's a tribute to him that the film doesn't idolise him. As the manager of the flashest hotel in Kigali, he's used to difficult situations, bestowing Havana cigars and single malts for maximum tactical effect. In the film's first half he's an obsequious, pragmatic and utterly colonised servant of his Belgian masters. He is determined to maintain appearances since that has always been his job, and it's a telling moment when he realises stress has robbed him of the ability to knot his tie and he elects to go open-necked and unshaven.

This gradual lapse in his grooming mirrors the meltdown going on outside the hotel which Paul, who is depicted as something of an accidental hero, turns into a refuge for more than 1000 Hutus and Tutsis by bribing, wheedling, lying and even blackmailing the right people.

The film takes a while to develop its sense of clammy dread and it never comes close to communicating the menace of some of the great political thrillers, such as Costa-Gavras' Z or Missing. Rather, it plays out as a series of narrow escapes from danger (in which Paul's squealing wife is a tiresome cliche) and the ending is unforgivably lachrymose. But in depicting the savagery indirectly and registering the effect of the killing on the living rather than revelling in explicit detail, it is commendably unsensational and remains a potent political drama.

Cast: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Joaquin Phoenix, Nick Nolte
Director: Terry George
Running time: 121 mins
Rating: M, adult themes
Screening: Rialto