Movie Review: Hotel Rwanda

American audiences will be incredibly moved by Hotel Rwanda and then, slowly, the movie will slip into the backs of our minds, forgotten. The movie portrays the efforts of a hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), to save over 1200 people from the genocide that claimed the lives of over one million people in Rwanda. It takes place in 1994 when two groups within Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, were fighting with each other. The president is murdered by supposed "Tutsi rebels" and Hutus begin to endlessly slaughter the Tutsis with machetes. The conflict is often called an "ethnic conflict", a horrible misnomer since the ethnic differences between the Hutus and Tutsis were arbitrarily created long ago by the colonizing Belgians. One compelling scene in the movie involves an American reporter (Joaquin Phoenix) inquiring as to the difference between Hutus and Tutsis. He is shocked to see that between two girls nearby, one Hutu and one Tutsi, there is no real physical difference. Only a list of names for each group allows one to clearly identify a person as either Hutu or Tutsi. To describe such a situation as "ethnic conflict," implying various ethnic differences, is absurd; rather, the conflict was a result of European colonization of Africa.
The movie is made compelling because it helps the audience visualize life in Rwanda. Rwanda is not a distant land equivalent to Mars. Nor is it comprised of grass huts and African savages holding spears in their hands. Rwanda looks a lot like the United States- there are roads, markets, neighborhoods, families, businesses and hotels. Visualizing Rwanda gives the audience room to sympathize with what is going on and imagine how that would be in one's own neighborhood. The horrors of the massacre are brought to life.
The major theme of the movie centers on western negligence to the situation. Paul continually serves white upper class men in his hotel and they befriend him. However, no interventionist force decides to get involved in the conflict, and UN peacekeepers evacuate his hotel, leaving it unprotected. Paul, who believes the Europeans to be his true friends, slowly realizes they have turned their backs on him and the Rwandan people. When viewing footage of dead people chopped by machetes, Paul asks an American reporter, "How can they [America, other nations] not intervene when they see these images?" He is then surprised when the reporter's answer is that people will see what is happening and continue their daily lives as if nothing has happened. Paul's change in character is profound; at first he is afraid to help people until he realizes it is his duty to do so.
The film’s theme can be applied to many current international situations because it illustrates the unwillingness of western nations, including the United States, to intervene in conflicts that provide no advantage to those nations. Rwanda, like the Sudan today, has no strategic and political importance to the United States. Therefore, the United States will never involve itself in the conflict, no matter how horrible it becomes. It is disingenuous, if not blatantly hypocritical, to hear U.S. policymakers use humanitarian rhetoric in justifying the War in Iraq. If the main reason for going to war with Iraq was to remove an evil dictator, Sadaam Hussein, then the United States would be intervening in the affairs of over half the African nations. This movie demonstrates that innocent dead bodies from a foreign country do not weigh heavily on the minds of U.S. policymakers.