I finally caught Hotel Rwanda a few nights ago. I expected it would be a good film, and it was. I had been putting off watching it because I assumed it would be incredibly depressing. It was and it wasn’t. Any film about genocide is going to give rise to some sober thoughts about the human condition. But it is also, of course, a film about the bravery of people standing up to the darker side of human nature. The two don’t quite balance out, but that’s not a fault of the film; that’s a truth of the aforementioned human condition.
I love Don Cheadle‘s acting. And he’s amazing here, as he frequently is. Supporting performances by Sophie Okonedo, Jaoquin Phoenix and Nick Nolte add a lot, though Okonedo is a bit over-the-top at times. The movie itself is beautiful to look at and convincingly directed. It pulled me in quickly and kept my interest even after the film was over.
The film itself tries hard to give you enough historical and political details about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide to understand the context, but I was ultimately a little lost, even though I tried hard to keep up. I don’t really see this as a flaw of the film. Providing too much exposition might have turned it into a pseudo-documentary and could have slowed it to a halt. I assume the filmmakers decided to focus on the human costs and let the historically curious seek out fuller explanations of the motivations elsewhere, perhaps in Frontline’s Ghosts of Rwanda, which I’ve just added to my Netflix queue. (Frontline makes a lot of their programs available online for free, but not this one.)
Hotel Rwanda is, ultimately, a film that leaves you scratching your head wondering, “why didn’t we do something about this sooner?” But the answer is delivered quite convincingly by Jaoquin Phoenix’s character, Jack, who plays a world-weary journalist. After Cheadle’s character, Paul, thanks Jack for filming details of the genocide, as he’s sure such documentation will bring swift aid and an end to the chaos, Jack makes his own, prophetic, assessment of how the images will be received: “I think if people see this footage, they’ll say Oh, my God, that’s horrible. And then they’ll go on eating their dinners.”