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Written by Keir Pearson and Terry George; directed by Terry George; starring Don Cheadle and Nick Nolte. Released to DVD on April 12, 2005.  The best and most dramatic stories to have ever existed are those that have actually taken place. Hollywood’s top screenwriters, talented as they may be, don’t stand a chance at ever capturing the nuance, intimacy and energy of real life. With the plethora of ‘based on a true story’ movies that have been released in the last several years, Hollywood seems to have picked up upon this thought. However, even the most cursory glance will tell you that the film industry is doing this in letter and name alone, not spirit. As with anything else, the proof is in the pudding. To wit: time and again, audiences are presented with harrowing tales of real woe and conflict that have been spiced up, spun in a slightly more viewer friendly manner or embellished to (supposedly) make them better and more exciting than the real thing! Though the subject of Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash, was a fascinating man, a brilliant thinker and overcame some of his mental problems to earn the respect of the mathematical world, he also was at times very anti-Semitic, experimented with homosexuality and occasionally thought he was being attacked by Napoleon Bonaparte. In order to sell the film to American audiences and Oscar voters, screenwriter Akiva Goldsmith simply purged these details from his script. With this concept in mind, co-writer/director Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda is a movie than can best be described as a project that succeeds in spite of the formulaic and phony elements its filmmakers felt it necessary to include in the final cut. Don Cheadle stars in Hotel Rwanda as Paul Rusesabagina, the assistant hotel manager of the Mirelle des Corelles in Kigali, Rwanda, one of a chain of five-star Belgian hotels on the African continent. More on Rusesabagina in a minute, first a little history, a particularly important topic here because George and co-writer Keir Pearson include shockingly few details about the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ of their story:  Rwanda is a small country in central Africa with a population that is basically divided into two groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis (the Hutus make up roughly 80% of Rwandans, Tutsis 15%). It’s hard to believe, but there are no real differing beliefs or opinions between the Hutus and Tutsis. The two groups speak the same language, often follow the same set of religious beliefs, inter-marry, work together and generally respect one another; given that no one is able to tell the Hutus from the Tutsis without looking at the labels printed on their identification cards, this shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. What is surprising though is the fact that Hutu and Tutsi hardliners despise one another, a trait that dates back to the late 19th century when the German colonists deemed the Tutsi the country’s elite class. Hutu/Tutsi relations went up and down over the course of the 20th century, but grew significantly worse in 1990 when a group of 3,000 deposed Tutsis invaded Rwanda from Uganda under the banner of the Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) with the intention of overthrowing the Hutu government and placing themselves in power. The RPF extremists were pushed back in Uganda by Rwanda’s mainly Hutu army, drawing the ire of the Hutu population in Rwanda with their ill-timed invasion. Tiring of the Tutsi power plays, the more militant Hutus began planning a final attack on the Tutsis to wipe them out for good. In the fall of 1994, when an unknown assailant shot down the Rwandan president’s plane in Rwanda’s capitol, Kigali, it triggered one of the worst incidents of genocide in modern history, with the Hutus focusing their murderous efforts on the women and children in order to stunt the next generation of Tutsis.
It was against this backdrop that Rusesabagina’s story came to prominence. Much like a Rwandan Oskar Schindler (and don’t think that anything other than that statement was used to pitch this movie to would-be investors), the Hutu Rusesabagina was sympathetic to the plight of the Tutsis, an emotion heightened by the fact that he married a Tutsi woman. In the throws of the revolution, some 1,200 persecuted Tutsis found safe haven in the rooms of Rusesabagina’s hotel. Like Schindler, Rusesabagina had only his charm, wit and cash to keep the refugees safe from the marauding bands of genocidal vigilantes prowling the streets. George has instilled in Hotel Rwanda an atmosphere of anarchy and chaos that I haven’t seen on screen since Ridley Scott’s Blackhawk Down. Lives are taken without so much as a second thought. Random killings aren’t the exception, they are the norm and at no moment is the viewer ever certain that something horrible isn’t going to happen. In itself this is quite an accomplishment for George. However, in retrospect, it’s doubtful that all of this is George’s doing, since Hotel Rwanda is strangely at its best and most energetic when Rusesabagina’s story of heroism isn’t being told. Nick Nolte co-stars in the film as UN Colonel Oliver. Nolte’s raspy voice and piercing stare are tailor-made to play armed men in situations of duress and as precisely that, he delivers in Hotel Rwanda in a big way. Though Oliver is a fictional character created specifically for the movie–it is believed that Oliver’s character was based upon real life Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallair–his story is the one I was most interested in. Consequently, Hotel Rwanda seems to work best when Oliver is on screen. Rusesabagina is an interesting character, true, but there are only so many times that one can view his bribing the members of the Hutu Army before the act becomes repetitive. While I will not take anything away from Rusesabagina acts, they were truly heroic, rebellious and dangerous, the sad truth is that they just aren’t that cinematic.  Oliver’s actions, however, are the reason that multiplexes are built. In command of hundreds of troops in the country, Oliver desperately wants to get involved in the fracas in order to save the Tutsis. Rebuffed by his UN superiors time and again, Oliver grows increasingly more frustrated as the film progresses, until he ultimately joins the fray against the Security Council’s wishes. In addition to the differing locations of their stories, Oliver’s in on the front, Rusesabagina’s is behind the scenes, there are two fundamental personality differences between Oliver and Rusesabagina that serve to heighten the disparity; Oliver is brusque and confrontational while Rusesabagina is more subservient and reserved, attempting to game the system from within. And compared with Oliver’s efforts to get a truckload of Tutsis through rebel strongholds with ten men at his side, Rusesabagina’s movements to bribe the Hutu Army with beer and jewelry just don’t seem to muster up as much drama and excitement. The result of this decision to focus on Rusesabagina is a movie that crackles with copious wit and electricity at just about every moment the lead character and his story aren’t present. George, Pearson, Cheadle and Nolte deserves a lot of credit for the haunting and atmospheric setting they (re)created in Hotel Rwanda, they also deserve to be taken slightly to task for not instilling the crispness and unique presentation of Oliver’s scenes in those with Rusesabagina. This was a good film that could have been an all-time classic had some minor tweaking to the script taken place in pre-production.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Rwanda is part of a region of Africa known as the Great Lakes region. |
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