Last year I wrote about the documentary film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine: "The seeds of genocide are always the same -- first comes the demonization of the other, then removal of the other from the general population, then the dehumanization of the prisoners AND the inculcation of those assigned as guards to regard the prisoners as less than human, and finally, extermination. Genocide takes place in both the developed world and the developing world, and it seems that this sort of scapegoating taken to the nth degree may just be part of human nature. Also part of human nature is the need to document and record the history of each episode of genocide, in what has so far proven to be a vain attempt to prevent repetition of the past by remembering it."

In one of the cruelest actions ever committed in Colonial history without any direct bloodshed, Belgium performed a "Trading Places" maneuver when its colony Rwanda became independent in 1962. After regarding the historically nomadic, lighter-skinned Tutsi minority as Rwandan aristocracy, they placed the Hutu majority in charge up on their departure. A fragile cease-fire that existed between the Hutu government and insurgent Tutsi rebels was shattered when Rwandan President Habyalimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, unleashing the violence against Tutsi rebels that resulted in the extermination of nearly 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. And the world did nothing.

As one of the cacophony of bloggers on the left side of the political spectrum, one of the things I find most baffling and frustrating about the current political scene is the willingness of those who support the current President to regard every move he makes as wonderful. They, of course, believe we did the same when Bill Clinton was president, but nothing could be further from the truth, particularly where the Administration's frustrating inaction in Rwanda is concerned. Still haunted by the image of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Somalia in a conflict he inherited from his predecessor, Clinton had neither the will nor the political capital to intervene in the slaughter. Worse, the Clinton Administration gave its blessing to the U.N. Security Council's decision to reduce the number of peacekeeping force to such a degree that those remained could do nothing but watch the slaughter. Forget about the recklessness in his personal life. The largest blot on the Clinton record is his timidity in the face of genocide, and believe me, we on the left were very well aware of it.

One man who could not stand by was Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager at the Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali, a moderate Hutu who provided safe harbor to over 1200 Tutsi and moderate Hutu at the hotel after the evacuation of its largely European clientele. Rusesabagina has been called "the Rwandan Oskar Schindler", but such analogies are facile and inaccurate, for Schindler's initial motivation was purely mercenary -- hiring Jews to work in his factories made pure business sense as a source of cheap labor. Humanitarianism kicked in later on. Rusesabagina found himself providing shelter and protection to his countrypeople simply because it was the right thing to do.

As portrayed by Don Cheadle, who will no longer be a relative unknown after this role, Rusesabagina is a man who enjoys the comforts that his position affords him -- a comfortable, attractive home; access to fine cigars and clothing, the prestige of working for a multinational company. If part of the position involves obsequious servitude to white European tourists and providing kickbacks in the form of bottles of good scotch to his country's military henchmen, so be it. Cheadle's Rusesabagina may be charming and affable, but he is also a shrewd operator who does what he needs to in order to get by. It's tempting to make such accidental heroes larger than life, but Cheadle inhabits this man in such a quiet, controlled performance that it's easy to forget you are watching a dramatic depiction. He makes every moment of this performance count. From his cocky musings on style at the beginning of the film, to the obvious moments of defiance against the military officer who can end his life at any moment, to his silent but obvious anguish as he makes the Hobson's choice to remain at the hotel with those under his protection instead of accompanying his wife and children to presumed safety, there isn't a moment in this performance that rings false.

Cheadle's performance is so quiet that at times he is nearly overshadowed by the ferocity of Sophie Okenedo's portrayal of Tatania, Rusesabagina's Tutsi wife. For a while it seems that her role is going to be one of the conventional damsel in distress, whose main role in the film is to look terrified.Yet when she unleashes her fury at what she perceives to be her husband's betrayal of their promise to each other, Hotel Rwanda ceases to be simply a film and becomes an almost uncomfortable glimpse into the complexity of a marriage. Among the excellent supporting cast, which includes Cara Seymour as a Red Cross worker, only Nick Nolte seems largely to have walked in from another film, and I'm not sure which one. His Col. Kenneth Oliver seems to be on a fairly continuous bender, and whether this is just a function of the recent Nolte mythos or intentional is not clear. Nolte's only convincing moment is when he tells Paul that the UN will not intervene, and it is a moment that will make you wince: "You're not even n----", he says, "...you're AFRICANS." Certainly US policy towards that continent in my lifetime has shown this statement to be true. Genocide among white people, such as that in the former Yugoslavia, warrants U.S. military intervention. Yet we tend to let dark-skinned Africans kill each other, and as Joaquin Phoenix's journalist wryly notes in HOTEL RWANDA, "They'll say 'Oh, isn't that horrible'...then go back to eating their dinner'".

The dichotomy of Rwandan life is evident in Robert Fraisse's cinematography. The Rwandan cities and countryside are shot in the gritty, washed-out colors we've come to expect from films shot in developing countries, as far back as The Harder they Come. This is contrasted with the vivid colors used in the sequences at the Hotel Mille Collines, where the grass is a vivid green, the water in the pool far too blue.

Terry George, whose last film was the Irish political drama Some Mother's Son, has mastered the ability to portray a huge amount of information in a single scene -- the bright, terrified eyes of a group of children from a local orphanage shining in a darkened hotel room. Those same children dancing around a pool as women bail water from the pool for cooking and washing, since the water has been turned off. George wisely chooses not to graphically depict the horrific machete hackings which characterized much of the Rwandan genocide. Instead, he uses the microcosm to portray the larger picture: the front yard of a middle-class family strewn with their corpses. A van hobbles over an improbably bumpy road, the bumps being more corpses. Rusesabagina begs his wife to promise to take the children and jump off the hotel's roof rather than be hacked to death by machete. This film shows us the Rwandan genocide through the eyes of the people who survived it. We don't need to see the blood, for the director and cast draw us into the film, and almost allow us to experience the horror first-hand.

This is a passionate film about an accidental hero that never once relies on sledgehammers to prove its point. By making the Rwandan genocide personal in telling Rusesabagina's story, George avoids the desensitization that occurs when a movie audience is subjected to graphic depictions of slaughters. By revealing the horror of the genocide through the reactions of those who survived it, George provides a far more emotional experience. No one who sees this film will emerge anything other than outraged.

Hopefully this outrage will remain with us when the Shia and Sunnis inevitably start going at each other in Iraq once one or the other group assumes power on January 30.

-- Jill Cozzi

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