I’m a big fan of basketball. Specifically, I love the Houston Rockets. So when I think about the year 1994, I think about the Rockets winning their first NBA Championship. That was a great team. I can name the entire roster, from Hakeem Olajuwon to Scotty Brooks. I can rattle off trivia, like how they began the season with a 15-0 record. I can name every playoff opponent: the Blazers, Suns, Jazz, and Knicks. 1994 was a great year.
Those things seemed important.
What I can’t do, though, is tell you a single thing about Rwanda. The Rockets were winning, and that’s all that mattered.
This is all preamble for the highest possible compliment I can give a filmmaker: Terry George, who directed the remarkable true story of Hotel Rwanda, has made me rethink the Rockets’ place in the universe.
In 1994, while Olajuwon blocked shots and spun to the baseline, and while I yelled at the refs and studied the box-scores, almost a million people in Rwanda were persecuted, hunted, and butchered. As Rwanda suffered a genocide, the rest of the world ignored it, and I watched basketball.
The brilliance of George, though, is that he doesn’t focus on the larger tragedy. He doesn’t dwell on the one million people, and he doesn’t sermonize with a Michael Moore-esque diatribe against the United States. That’s too vague. “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” or so Stalin said, and Terry George listened.
Instead of getting lost in the big picture, George sticks to the true-life story of one man, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle, in a surefire Oscar performance), who attempts to shelter a thousand refugees from the genocide. Hotel Rwanda is not about politics; it’s not about foreign policy, and it’s not even about the genocide. Not really. Hotel Rwanda is an old-fashioned romance, a story of adventure and courage, a tale of heroes against villains.
As the movie begins, we’re introduced to Paul Rusesabagina as the cool-headed manager of a four-star hotel. Rusesabagina is competent, smooth-talking, and concerned with himself and his family, but not so much about the rest of Rwanda. The hotel is surrounded with hints of danger and the threat of civil war, but the flimsy presence of the United Nations—personified by UN agent Col. Oliver (Nick Nolte)—holds a tenuous peace.
Rusesabagina is crafty and resourceful. Given the looming violence, he knows that there might come a time when his family is not safe. So he uses his hotel connections to make friends with higher powers—Col. Oliver, Rwanda generals, foreign ambassadors and the like. Wearing a stylish suit and flaunting expensive cigars, Rusesabagina shakes hands and doles out bribes, saving up favors for a rainy day.
Gradually, and without ...
