Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo in Hotel Rwanda: A View from the West - Page 2

This isn't to say that horror and disgust at the departure of the armed peacekeepers aren't appropriate, but the movie generates those emotions in the most routine way. Compare it to this searching, balanced essay by Charles Peña on the Cato Institute website. Peña is aware of the degree to which U.S. intervention may exacerbate international crises and is opposed on principle to our acting as the world's policeman. He further notes the recent debacle in Somalia that led to the decision not to intervene in Rwanda. In addition, he points out that even someone in favor of stopping genocide faces the difficulty of deciding when a specific situation constitutes genocide and in Rwanda the possible futility of any intervention because of the rapidity of the killing ("intervention would not have averted genocide, though it could have saved a great many lives"). Nonetheless, Peña feels that "Rwanda presented an unambiguous moral imperative," and it's only when someone has offered you this breadth of information and analysis that you feel he's justified in saying, as Peña does: "The sad and shameful truth is that American politics and policy would allow the U.S. to become engaged in Bosnia-Herzegovina because it was in Europe, but not in Rwanda because it was in Africa."

The most interesting conceptual aspect of Hotel Rwanda is the irony that it's Paul's semi-corrupt business practices that (like Oskar Schindler's) save the day when there's nothing between the intended Tutsi victims and death. But George implements that irony very clumsily. It's painful to watch the opening scenes of Paul's palm-greasing and glad-handing because there's nothing else to look at as each piece is snapped into place. We understand we're witnessing Paul's daily practice but it doesn't feel in the least like something that occurs so regularly it's taken for granted. (And the movie isn't interested in irony, anyway. It's all about the romance of virtue.) George has nothing like the fluidity that Chris Menges showed in A World Apart (1988), his spectacularly well shot movie about a white anti-apartheid activist and her daughter in South Africa in the 1960s. (Menges is the peerless cinematographer of Neal Jordan's The Good Thief (2003), Jim Sheridan's The Boxer (1997), Clare Peploe's High Season (1988), Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984), and Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983).)

And not all of Hotel Rwanda is so very high-minded. The suspense is numbingly predictable even before it becomes repetitious, and the sequence in which Paul thinks his wife and children have jumped from the roof gives you the kind of hyped-up work-over you'd expect from an Alan Parker movie. George co-wrote the scripts for In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer with Jim Sheridan, but writing here with Keir Pearson and directing himself he hasn't summoned the world-encompassing naturalism that is Sheridan's great, novelistic gift.

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 …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog