I have known a few hotel managers fairly well, and I think if I were hiring diplomats they would make excellent candidates. They speak several languages. They are discreet. They know how to function appropriately in different cultures. They know when a bottle of Scotch will repay itself six times over. They know how to handle complaints. And they know everything that happens under their roof, from the millionaire in the penthouse to the bellboy who can get you a girl (the wise manager fires such bellboys, except perhaps for one who is prudent and trustworthy and a useful resource on certain occasions).
Paul is such a hotel manager. He is a Hutu, married to a Tutsi named Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo). He has been trained in Belgium and runs the four-star Hotel Des Milles Collines in the capital city of Kigali. He does his job very well. He understands that when a general’s briefcase is taken for safekeeping, it contains bottles of good Scotch when it is returned. He understands that to get the imported beer he needs, a bribe must take place. He understands that his guests are accustomed to luxury, which must be supplied even here in a tiny central African nation wedged against Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Congo (formerly Zaire). Do these understandings make him a bad man? Just the opposite. They make him an expert on situational ethics. The result of all the things he knows is that the hotel runs well and everyone is happy.
Then the genocide begins, suddenly, but after a long history. Rwanda’s troubles began, as so many African troubles began, when European colonial powers established nations that ignored traditional tribal boundaries. Enemy tribes were forced into the same land. For years in Rwanda under the Belgians, the Tutsis ruled, and killed not a few Hutu. Now the Hutus are in control, and armed troops prowl the nation, killing Tutsis.
There is a United Nations “presence” in Rwanda, represented by Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte). He sees what is happening, informs his superiors, asks for help and intervention, and is ignored. Paul Rusesabagina informs corporate headquarters in Brussels of the growing tragedy, but the hotel in Kigali is not the chain’s greatest concern. Finally it comes down to these two men acting as freelancers to save more than a thousand lives they have somehow become responsible for.
When Hotel Rwanda premiered at Toronto in 2004, two or three reviews criticized the film for focusing on Rusesabagina and the colonel, and making little effort to “depict” the genocide as a whole. But director Terry George and writer Keir Pearson have made exactly the correct decision. A film cannot be about a million murders, but it can be about how a few people respond. Paul Rusesabagina, as it happens, is a real person, and Colonel Oliver is based on one, and Hotel Rwanda is about what they really did. The story took shape after Pearson visited Rwanda and heard of a group of people who were saved from massacre.
Don Cheadle’s performance is always held resolutely at the human level. His character intuitively understands that only by continuing to act as a hotel manager can he achieve anything. His hotel is hardly functioning, the economy has broken down, the country is ruled by anarchy, but he puts on his suit and tie every morning and fakes business as usual—even on a day he is so frightened he cannot tie his tie.
He deals with a murderous Hutu general, for example, not as an enemy or an outlaw, but as a longtime client who knows that the value of a good cigar cannot be measured in cash. Paul has trained powerful people in Kigali to consider the Hotel Des Milles Collines an oasis of sophistication and decorum, and now he pretends that is still the case. It isn’t, but it works as a strategy because it cues a different kind of behavior; a man who has yesterday directed a mass murder might today want to show that he knows how to behave appropriately in the hotel lobby.
Nolte’s performance is also in a precise key. He came to Rwanda as a peace-keeper, and now there is no peace to keep. The nations are united in their indifference toward Rwanda. Nolte’s bad-boy headlines distract from his acting gifts; here his character is steady, wise, cynical, and a master of the possible. He makes a considered choice in ignoring his orders and doing what he can do, right now, right here, to save lives.
How the twelve hundred people come to be “guests” in the hotel is a chance of war. Some turn left, some right, some live, some die. Paul is concerned above all with his own family. As a Hutu he is safe, but his wife is Tutsi, his children are at threat, and in any event he is far beyond thinking in tribal terms. He has spent years storing up goodwill, and now he calls in favors. He moves the bribery up another level. He hides people in his hotel. He lies. He knows how to use a little blackmaiclass="underline" Sooner or later, he tells a powerful general, the world will take a reckoning of what happened in Kigali, and if Paul is not alive to testify for him, who else will be believed?
This all succeeds as riveting drama. Hotel Rwanda is not about hotel management, but about heroism and survival. Rusesabagina rises to the challenge. The film works not because the screen is filled with meaningless special effects, formless action, and vast digital armies, but because Don Cheadle, Nick Nolte, and the filmmakers are interested in how two men choose to function in an impossible situation. Because we sympathize with these men, we are moved by the film. Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good. You will see what I mean.
Note: The character of Colonel Oliver is based on Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian who was the UN force commander in Rwanda. His autobiography, Shake Hands with the Devil, was published in October 2004.
Ikiru
NO MPAA RATING, 143 m., 1952
Takashi Shimura (Kanji Watanabe), Shin’ichi Himori (Kimura), Haruo Tanaka (Sakai). Directed by Akira Kurosawa and produced by Sojiro Motoki. Screenplay by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni.
The old man knows he is dying of cancer. In a bar, he tells a stranger he has money to spend on a “really good time,” but doesn’t know how to spend it.
The stranger takes him out on the town, to gambling parlors, dance halls, and the red-light district, and finally to a bar where the piano player calls for requests and the old man, still wearing his overcoat and hat, asks for “Life Is Short—Fall in Love, Dear Maiden.”
“Oh, yeah, one of those old ’20s songs,” the piano man says, but he plays it, and then the old man starts to sing. His voice is soft and he scarcely moves his lips, but the bar falls silent, the party girls and the drunken salary men drawn for a moment into a reverie about the shortness of their own lives.
This moment comes near the center point of Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film about a bureaucrat who works for thirty years at Tokyo City Hall and never accomplishes anything. Mr. Watanabe has become the chief of his section, and sits with a pile of papers on either side of his desk, in front of shelves filled with countless more documents. Down a long table on either side of him, his assistants shuffle these papers back and forth. Nothing is ever decided. His job is to deal with citizen complaints, but his real job is to take a small rubber stamp and press it against each one of the documents, to show that he has handled it.
The opening shot of the film is an X-ray of Watanabe’s chest. “He has gastric cancer but doesn’t yet know it,” says a narrator. “He just drifts through life. In fact, he’s barely alive.”
The X-ray fades into his face—into the sad, tired, utterly common face of the actor Takashi Shimura, who in eleven films by Kurosawa and many by others played an everyman who embodied his characters by not seeming to embody anything at all.
There is a frightening scene in his doctor’s office, where another patient chatters mindlessly; he is a messenger of doom, describing Watanabe’s precise symptoms and attributing them to stomach cancer. “If they say you can eat anything you want,” he says, “that means you have less than a year.” When the doctor uses the very words that were predicted, the old bureaucrat turns away from the room, so that only the camera can see him, and he looks utterly forlorn.