Hotel Rwanda 2005
The story of the Rwanda genocide in 1994 is one that needed to be told and it is sad that it took ten years for this movie to be made. The movie focuses on the story of a hotel manager who was able to save the lives of over a thousand people by letting them stay at his hotel and using bribes, bluffs, and personal connections to protect them until they could get out safely. That’s a very important story as well.
A guy I was talking to once blew me away by saying Schindler’s List was terrible because it was the “feel good movie of the Holocaust.” I couldn’t believe someone would say Schindler’s List was a bad movie (and I thought it was pretty good). But I can’t help but think the same thing about this movie, that is the feel good movie of the Rwandan genocide where we are given this sweet treat of a man saving a thousand people along with the bitter pill of nearly a million killed. But the Holocaust was well-documented, so Spielberg didn’t have to explain Hitler, World War II, ethnic cleansing, etc. He could just jump right in and tell his sidebar story. The director here has to explain everything: what Hutus and Tutsis are, why they started fighting, what happened, etc., along with the story of this hotel manager. It wasn’t easy and frankly the guy is no Spielberg (and I’m sure didn’t have anywhere near the budget Spielberg could afford either).
I thought the acting by just about everyone was flat to horrible. Don Cheadle is a great actor, but this material is very challenging and his accent didn’t seem quite right. It is very hard to know how someone would act when the world around them becomes such an unimaginable nightmare; we have no reference points really and you can’t just show someone crying or freaking out all the time (which probably isn’t realistic anyway). The plot is very mechanical as it lays down some of the background and then shows one point after another. I never felt sucked in to the whole thing. Watching the “making of” feature later I started to realize why. The writer originally wrote the script as a multi-threaded movie like Traffic, but the director changed it to focus on the positive story so as not to scare people off. That was a mistake. I think people were still scared off (sorry, everyone knew it was a genocide movie) and meanwhile important side stories were left out. Nick Nolte really struggles to be believable as a Canadian Colonel in the UN peacekeeping operation. He has the feeling of being an amalgam of different people placed both high and low, but the problem is no other UN military even have speaking parts. There is a press crew with Joaquin Phoenix who play an important side role but then are gone, never to be heard from again. I just felt like even though a lot of the story was probably true, it just wasn’t presented well. The hotel manager really should have been a side character and the stories should have been loosely intertwined like in Crash. Less of the the hotel manager would have been more.
So while I think the story is important and people should probably see this movie to get a PG-13 look at a very violent R-rated subject, ultimately the movie itself isn’t that great. I’ll give it a C+, but still recommend seeing it.
Written: 28 Jun 2006