The assassination of Hutu dictator Habyarimana in April 1994 triggered a civil war between the Tutsis and Hutus. In the portion of the nation controlled by Hutus, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were murdered by roving gangs of Hutus. Hutus who opposed the slaughter, or who sheltered Tutsis, were also killed.
In one neighborhood, as the massacre commenced, Tutsis fled to the home of the one Hutu they could trust: Paul Rusesabagina. Paul (Don Cheadle) is married to Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo), a Tutsi, and they have three minor children. Paul has a western education, and has manager connections to the Hotel des Mille Collines, a posh hotel that caters to foreigners. These hotels are sometimes protected by United Nation peacekeepers, whose front man is grizzled Nick Nolte.
Paul needs a safe haven for his Tutsi family and neighbors. They take shelter at the hotel, and are joined by child refugees brought in by Red Cross worker Cara Seymour. The hotel, of course, is threatened by Hutu militias, who appear certain to seize the hotel and slaughter its occupants after foreign nationals (including U.N. peacekeepers) flee the country.
Paul is the leader and spokesman of the hotel refugees, and tries to keep them alive by bribing Hutu general Fana Mokoena. Once Paul runs out of alcohol and foreign currency to ply the Hutu militias, it appears that Paul's family and the other hotel refugees are doomed.
How others will see it. This life or death drama is made more horrific by a reality check: it's not fiction. Since the West did little at the time the massacres occurred, praising Hotel Rwanda was politically correct, and it certainly helped that the movie was, in addition, very good. The film received three Oscar nominations (Cheadle, Okonedo, and screenwriters Terry George and Keir Pearson), and this created enough buzz to earn a profit at the box office.
The imdb.com user ratings are extremely high, enough to launch the movie into the upper half of that site's Top 250. It must be said, though, that the over 45 crowd is less favorable, in addition to females under 18. Presumably, some within both groups find the film unpleasant, the antithesis (in their minds) to the entertainment purpose of the movie industry.
How I felt about it. Injustice is a powerful film theme, and few filmmakers have more career experience with it than Terry George. Born in Northern Ireland, he has worked with Jim Sheridan on In the Name of the Father (1993), which criticizes the effective British occupation in his homeland. Two IRA movies followed, Some Mother's Son and The Boxer, then came A Bright Shining Lie, which raked the coals of the Vietnam War, and Hart's War, a World War II drama about a black man falsely accused of murder.
It is impossible to criticize Hotel Rwanda without appearing, at a minimum, insensitive. Nonetheless, we must state that Paul Rusesabagina, as portrayed, here, is the most admirable person in the history of the humanity. Others must agree, since he has been showered with awards in recent years, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. Critics, however, are naturally suspicious creatures, and we wonder whether Rusesabagina the man is as close to perfect as Rusesabagina the film character.
Black versus White: Both the murderers and the victims are black. Nonetheless, Hotel Rwanda alleges that whites are also to blame. First, the Belgium colonists favored the Tutsis over the Hutus, which brought accusations of collaboration from the Hutus. And when the massacres began in 1994, the rest of the world (such as the United States) looked the other way. Was it because the victims were African?
But the U.S. had no vested interests in Rwanda. A humanitarian intervention in Somalia that took place just the year before, 1993, ended in a military embarrassment for the U.S. (re Black Hawk Down). American guilt over Rwanda probably contributed to the 1999 intervention in a different genocide in Kosovo. Should the U.N. have intervened in Rwanda in 1994? Of course, but it appears from the film that such an intervention would have been too late to stop the massacre, which mostly occurred over a few days. The ultimate blame for it falls upon the Hutu militias, who dehumanized the Tutsis as "cockroaches."