There's plenty of room at the Hotel des Milles Collines.
Why has it taken so long for Don Cheadle to be given any kind of lead role at all? Not to look a gift casting agent in the mouth; I'm so relieved he's no longer forced to bring his elegance to bit hoodlum parts (
Bulworth
,
Out of Sight
) that I'd watch
Hotel Rwanda
, based
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on the true story of a man who saved over twelve hundred Tutsis from genocidal slaughter, even if it were absolutely awful.
It's not.
In 1994, Kigali residents have to show identification cards, clearly stamped HUTU or TUTSI, to travel in their own city. Belgian colonialists chose Tutsis as collaborators because they were paler, taller and more European-featured, and, now, after decolonization, the Hutu majority despise the Tutsis. Meanwhile Paul Rusesabagina (Cheadle), Hutu manager of the ultra-posh Hotel des Milles Collines, moves through his average day charming Rwandans of all persuasions and Europeans alike. "I have no time for politics," he demurs fastidiously when a Hutu colleague tries to involve him. Lubricating his path through polite society with bribes of single-malt Scotch, he seems rooted in obsequious denial, but his Tutsi wife Tatiana (the startling Sophie Okonedo of
Dirty Pretty Things
) sees all too clearly what's coming. Small but ominous pieces of evidence begin to accumulate-a case of beer which bursts open to reveal machetes, night raids to arrest "Tutsi spies," power outages and abruptly off-the-air radio stations. As the political situation worsens, Tutsi friends and neighbors gather (or more accurately cower) in Rusesabagina's house and before you can say "refugee camp" he's sheltering over a thousand people inside the hotel. But doing so requires every shred of his business ingenuity.
Hotel Rwanda
belongs to Cheadle; his understated performance never falters. And he augments Rusesabagina's heroism, portraying unimaginable bravery every time he walks with seeming calm into certain death. Survival depends on the fact that the Rwandan military still view the Milles Collines as a first-class European hotel, so Rusesabagina knots his tie with precision and keeps doormen and desk clerks in uniform, relying on his ability to manipulate officials and lie convincingly-even as refugees sleep on hallway floors and dip drinking water out of the once-luxurious swimming pool. The one scene in which Rusesabagina finally
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breaks down (after a gut-churning, ghoulish trip out of the hotel, trying to conduct business as usual while driving the delivery van over bodies and past burning homes) is all the more stunning for his refusal to let anyone see him collapse.
While Cheadle's and Okonedo's performances carry the film, Nick Nolte deserves mention as the politically castrated, hard-drinking UN colonel blunt enough to admit why no Western aid is forthcoming: "You're dirt. We think you're dirt. All the superpowers…everything you believe in." When Rusesabagina responds by abandoning his colonial deference, his newfound African self-reliance gleams across the screen. Joaquin Phoenix, as a foreign correspondent notes, when people watch the news footage, "They'll say, oh my God, that's horrible, and then go on eating their dinners." The disturbing part about this film's success will be how easy and how comfortable first-world audiences will find it to wax indignant about Rwandan suffering now, a full decade later.
