Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004)

The other night my wife and I watched Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004) on DVD. It was in no way a bad film. It was well written, acted, and photographed, and at no point was the pacing off in any way. It was also utterly predictable, and from the very beginning it grabbed you by the neck and screamed, "THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF, DAMMIT! YOU WILL PAY ATTENTION AND YOU WILL FEEL GUILTY AFTERWARDS, YOU FAT, RICH, AMERICAN DEVIL!!!" And if the motivation - comparisons to contemporary Sudan - weren't so glaringly obvious, there was a special message from star Don Cheadle telling you the same thing is going on right now.

All in all, very earnest stuff.

In the film there are two groups of bad guys, the Hutu militia bent on annhilating the Tutsi minority, and the (white) western world, personified by the UN and the foreign press, who let it happen. The motivations for the Hutus' attempted genocide of the Tutsis was never adequately explained. "Hatred", yes, due to longstanding animosities perpetuated and exacerbated by Belgian colonial rule, but I don't see simple hatred as a sufficient explanation to why one group of people was able to massacre between 500,000 and 1 million of another group of people in the space of a few months, especially when using machetes to do it. Even though this really happened, the numbers just seem too over-the-top to be understandable anyway, but with the rationale (such as it is) for such a brutal undertaking so completely glossed over, it becomes (dare I say it) unbelievable.

So, the film treats one group of bad guys as less than cartoons. They'e almost completely faceless hordes of murderous animals. This strikes me as overtly senseless and covertly racist. Once you've reduced half a nation of black Africans to senseless, automatonic killing machines, you've reduced them to, at best, the level of dumb beasts.

White Europeans (and Americans) come off a bit better - at least they have a face, if not a motivation (beyond apathy, that is). There are four whites with important enough roles to select out: an American Colonel in charge of the UN forces (Nick Nolte), who is rendered impotent by orders not to shoot at anyone, an American photographer (Joachim Phoenix) who helps supply backstory by asking dumb questions, a Red Cross nurse (Cara Seymour), and an uncredied Jean Reno as the president of Sabena Airlines, the parent company of the hotel run by Cheadle's character. All of these rich white people are sympathetic to the cause of the Rwandans, but all are ultimately powerless to change the situation dramatically.

But the real faceless enemies are the UN leadership and the governments of nations like the US, Britain, and France. If the victim's weren't black we'd have cared, the movie tells us, and to some degree I suppose that's true. But western Europe didn't really get involved in Yugoslavia until it was too late to prevent genocide there, and the last I looked, most Bosnians are white. And current UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is himself a black African, has been widely criticized for not doing more to prevent current-day genocide in Sudan. So, racism seems a conveniently facile, yet overblown reason for such global apathy. My own personal (and horribly cynical) theory is that, since the end of the Cold War the third world has become irrelevant to most of the world, as it no longer serves as a place to fight 'satellite' or 'proxy' wars.

Having been a fan of Cheadle for many years, I was glad to see him get a starring role in such a major, Oscar-bound film. He did not dissapoint. The rest of the cast preformed at the same high level. On every technical benchmark the film ranks as highly proficient, if uninspired. However, the insistent, omnipresent background music was jarring during suspenseful scenes, detracting from the mood in almost every instance. I tend to hate all incidental music in films, and Hotel Rwanda does nothing to change that view. This probably sums up the film fairly well - a work made by intelligent, insightful people, who couldn't trust their audience to be equally intelligent and insightful.