Hotel Rwanda

Honorably-made and important, Terry George’s film tells a story that needs to be told, in a coherent if not especially dynamic manner, but it is the performance of the always-exceptional Don Cheadle that grabs you, excites your attention. Hotel Rwanda has none of the propulsive, you-are-there energy of Bloody Sunday for example, immersing you in a tense situation descending through anarchy to mayhem. Instead you sit back and admire Cheadle and his character in the Schindleresque attempt to salvage a saving remnant from the abyss of genocide. You don’t participate in the terror, face your own anguished choice. (Pardon the Kaelish “you” -- believe me, I’m no Paulette.) I confess I will usually skip over a magazine story on a distant, horrific tragedy like the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis, it’s so awful but so remote; and thus I definitely learned things from the movie that I didn’t know about this old yet ever-present news. One of the movie’s artful touches, the use of the radio to supply narration through the hateful Hutu announcer, actually conveyed an important point about armed insurgencies, why their first target will always be the available media. Thankfully the film did not become a gorefest -- a box of machetes spilling out over the floor and a snippet of newsreel seen on an editing machine were sufficient to suggest the unimaginable. And again, Cheadle really holds the film together with his portrayal of an accomplished manager trying to manage an unmanageable situation, but his choices never become our choice. To be bearable the film had to fit the story to a familiar arc, which is an inevitable falsification through wish-fulfillment. So it qualifies as edifying entertainment, but hardly suffices as a call to action in current and future situations of a lamentably similar nature. (2004, Images, n.) *7* (MC-79, RT-90)