Hotel Rwanda

To be brutally honest, I don’t know what this movie is doing in the top 250 movies of all time. It shouldn’t be anywhere near that list. Though, I supposed people were affected a lot by it.

I didn’t think it was a very good movie. Sure, the story deserved to be told, the filmmakers’ hearts are in the right place. They’re trying to bring this atrocity to a wide audience, but it’s a double-edged sword. They also have the responsibility to tell the story well, and to make the movie match the real-life horrors. In this respect, they failed.

One problem, I think, is that the movie gets stuck in the Hollywood formula. Maybe these are the actual events as Paul Rusesabagina experienced them, but it would do well to go outside that scope too. It’s still horribly caught in the feel-good “based on a true story” happy-ending mould and that only cheapens the reality.

It’s also very preachy. Don Cheadle spends a lot of time looking chagrined, and the white people around him (Joaquin Phoenix, Nick Nolte) do their best to express the shame felt by the western world. It doesn’t work, and it’s clumsy and self-righteous. So, cinematically, not quite a disaster, but not far from it.

Still, it’s decent, and that’s only because it plays on our emotions. There’s no question it’s absolutely tragic and horrifying. I went through the gamut of human emotion watching this, but I felt manipulated into it a lot of the time.

Performance-wise, I was not very impressed. Cheadle does his best with the clumsy script, but Phoenix feels horribly out of place — he’s just a mouthpiece for the filmmakers to feel better about themselves and the story they’re telling. Sophie Okonedo gives a powerful performance though.

It’s a decent movie to watch if only to get some of the basic facts about the genocide. But as a movie, it’s tragic in its own right. It deserved so much more than this mess.