Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

I guess the Hollywood ending of "Hotel Rwanda" (2004, co-written and directed by Terry George [A Bright Shining Lie]) is fully justified, because it is true. So are the Hutu butchery of Tutsi, and the bravery and resourcefulness of Hutu hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle) who sheltered and managed to save more than twelve hundred Tutsi during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is also true--a true story of one man who took great personal risks and made a difference within a holocaust of violence and genocide.

Rusesabagina was the African Oskar Schindler (of "Schindler's List",) albeit one less compromised with collusion with the devils before taking heroic action. Rusesabagina was an efficient hotel manager, getting along well with the distant corporate officials as well as the local government ones.

Don Cheadle is phenomenal playing a phenomenal man. His performance and the magnitude of the violence do not need to be amped up with music in the Max Steiner tradition in my opinion. What he is shown doing is impressive enough and the violence is horrible enough and are cheapened with overwrought music (supplied by Rupert Gregson-Williams, Andrea Guerra, and Martin Russell).

The film is extremely good at showing ordinary folk leaping into barbarism. Initially, Rusesabagina resists trying to protect anyone other than family members and employees, while his neighbors kill each other. He is unable to sustain the "keep your head down" amoral familialism and takes on a mass of dependents while (heroically) aspiring not to be a hero. Rusesabagina's Tutsi wife is also extraordinarily realized on screen by Sophie Okonedo. Each entirely loses their usual great composure once, and even in a film with so many corpses, the most harrowing scene may be one in which he makes her promise to leap off the hotel roof with their children if the Hutu militia/mob breaks into the hotel. Whew!

The rest of the world stood by, knowing of the massacres, but the movie's point of view faults only the indifference of the West. There is not the slightest suggestion that African nations that have been independent for decades might have some responsibility for stopping genocide committed by Africans on other kinds of Africans (in Rwanda or, now, in the Sudan, or the depredations of Robert Mugabe, who is not propped up by any European or American quasi-allies).


Recommended: Yes