Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo in Hotel Rwanda: A View from the West

Writer-director Terry George's Hotel Rwanda tells the true story of how Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the luxury Hotel des Milles Collines in the Rwandan capital Kigali, used the skills of negotiation and bribery necessary to keep the hotel supplied and operating to save over a thousand members of the Tutsi minority from the Hutu majority's genocidal attacks in 1994. This historic episode can't help but be moving as Tutsis, including Paul's wife, converge on the hotel for safety, which depends increasingly on Paul's machinations as the UN forces pull out and leave them to the ruthless Hutu-controlled army, gendarmerie, and militias.

The movie would have greater effect by far, however, if it had been developed as a work of naturalism, that is, if the story's structure grew out of historical reportage and analysis. Instead, George shapes the story as heroic romance in which Paul is the knight whose quest is forced on him by political events. His spirit expands as the threat to the Tutsis increases and it's one of those movies that's intended to make audiences' spirits "soar." But when, during a break in the massacres, Paul's wife tells him he's a good man, you realize that the thoroughly conventional question of whether Paul will brave all dangers to embrace virtue or not is the center of the movie, just as it is in any other chivalric romance. As good a man as circumstances appear to have made of Paul Rusesabagina, treating his story as heroic romance makes it less distinctive than a fuller attention to those world-stage circumstances would have.

As a result of the focus on Paul you won't learn much about the historic forces that produced the genocide, which was catalyzed by fascist exhortations over the radio by Hutu hardliners after the Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's jet was shot down. The movie couldn't tell you much about the genocide without expanding the focus beyond Paul and the hotel. And a further reason it does not do this is because its political vision focuses not on what the Africans did to each other but on the western forces' failure to intervene. But you don't learn much about that, either, because the bad international decisionmakers aren't characters in the movie at all.

Nick Nolte does play a UN military peacekeeper who's ordered not to let his armed men use their guns to protect the Tutsis. When he learns that the UN has decided to abandon the Tutsis to their fate he is given a bizarre speech to Paul: "The West, all the superpowers, they think you're dirt. They think you're dung. You're not even a nigger. You're African." This is the voice of a westerner venting about western attitudes toward Africans. It's spoken directly to Paul and yet it's a sign that although the moviemakers have fashioned the story as Paul's heroic romance their political attitudes aren't really focused on these Africans, either. No, Paul and his fellow Rwandans aren't "niggers," they're victims of our geopolitical maneuvering, they're the nameless dead we--meaning, of course, westerners--should feel guilty about.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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