Hotel Rwanda tells a startling true story of heroism amid the genocide of 1994 that claimed the lives of nearly a million people.
As the manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Paul Rusesabagina risked his life to turn the hotel into a covert refugee camp. While machete-wielding Hutu militants swarmed the streets seeking the extermination of their countrymen, he refused to reveal the whereabouts of his Tutsi acquaintances, and bribed generals to secure food and water. This African Oskar Schindler is credited with saving more than 1,200 lives.
Few could dispute that Paul’s story deserves to reach as wide an audience as possible, and with this in mind, director Terry George employs some genuine Hollywood heavyweights for maximum box-office appeal. Don Cheadle, previously best known for Ocean’s Eleven, gives what may become a career-defining performance as Paul, while Joaquin Phoenix and Nick Nolte jet into Africa from the A-list in more minor roles.
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The production values are high. Eschewing the documentary-style approach of Schindler’s List, for example, Hotel Rwanda has a glossy sheen about it and some bullet-dodging sequences have the feel of an action movie. Perhaps this clash of style and substance would not jar so much if the script too did not feel as though it had been lifted from a film with less worthy intentions.
Paul and his wife Tatiana (the Oscar-nominated British actor, Sophie Okonedo) are the only two drawn upon to perform anything more than a just a narrative function; their characters are alone in possessing any complexity. The remaining performers, in particular Nolte, are fluent in nothing but movie-speak, an irritating blend of anguished cliché and grand truisms.
The strength of Hotel Rwanda - and it is a powerful, moving picture despite its flaws - comes from its depiction of the killing fields and refugee camps. The whole project is both worthy and worthwhile and deserves applause for bringing a notoriously neglected atrocity off the remote newswires and into the multiplexes. It is just a shame that a film so rooted in a tragedy of humanity struggles to find among many of its principal players anything, well, human.