Eyes wide shut

In "Terror and Liberalism" Paul Berman points out that the left, steeped in the Rousseauist principles of enlightenment, has had trouble crediting the irrational, even when the irrational is embodied in the fascist movements the left has traditionally opposed. George and Pearson understand that no explanation can ever fully account for an outbreak of the irrational on as massive a level as the Rwandan genocide. In essence, they are saying that evil took over in Rwanda.

You feel that evil in the movie's opening. We stare at a black screen while we hear the sound of one of the radio broadcasts that stirred the Hutus to murder. As seductive and repellent as a serpent in the garden, the Hutu announcer tells his listeners that their Tutsi neighbors are traitors and instructs them to "stay alert." By the time Paul is driving home in the dark and ominous, unintelligible murmurs are weaving in and out of the static on the radio, it's as if the country is in thrall to a force that is whispering poison directly into its brain.

This is not a subtle or nuanced view. But to want something subtle or nuanced in a film made to show the shame of a genocide that could have been prevented is to say that aesthetics should trump moral urgency. It's to invoke "culture" -- a quality the West did not embody in its abandonment of the Tutsis -- as one more way to insulate ourselves from our culpability in the Rwandan genocide.

Which is why that speech of Nolte's contains so much of the essence of "Hotel Rwanda." It makes perfect dramatic sense that the colonel, a soldier frustrated by the idiot orders that designated U.N. soldiers "peacekeepers" but prevented them from doing anything that might actually bring about an end to the killing (this is not a pacifist film), would speak in exactly those disgusted tones. (It's the disgust you find in "Shake Hands With the Devil," the memoir by the man who is the basis for Nolte's character, Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who was the commander of the U.N. forces in Rwanda.)

The lines make even more sense when you compare them with the words being said at the time by American officials in response to the genocide, words you can find in the excoriating section on Rwanda in Samantha Power's "'A Problem From Hell': America and the Age of Genocide." Prudence Bushnell, then deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, remembers being told, "Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time." After the evacuation of foreign nationals, Sen. Bob Dole said, "I don't think we have any national interest there. The Americans are out, and as far as I'm concerned, in Rwanda, that ought to be it." The Clinton administration consistently opposed use of the word "genocide," and a position paper from the secretary of defense's office warned, "Be careful ... Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually 'do something.'" "Hotel Rwanda" lets us hear the actual exchange between State Department shill Christine Shelly and Reuters reporter Alan Elsner when Shelly said that "acts of genocide" were taking place in Rwanda but, despite Elsner's attempts to pin her down, insisted that she could not claim those acts constituted "genocide."

George and Pearson have taken the full moral measure of those weaselly public utterances and dozens of others and stripped away the euphemism and self-justification the West employed in its refusal to stop the Rwandan genocide. Instead of the politesse of "these people," we get "niggers." Instead of the couched bureaucratic platitude "I don't think we have any national interest there," we get "They think you're dirt." If Nolte's character responded any less fiercely, "Hotel Rwanda" would have slid into the very squeamishness it's exposing, and the result would have been as aesthetically and morally grotesque as if, in "Bonnie and Clyde," Arthur Penn had decided to cut away from the violence.

"Hotel Rwanda" is a terrific example of what movies can do when they seize real events as raw material and are made by people who are passionate and canny, who know just how far they can squeeze us without turning crass or exploitative. It's as good a political melodrama as anyone has made since "Z." The movies offer us so little connection to real life (even to the point of denying the recognizable human emotion that has always been present in the greatest entertainments) that "Hotel Rwanda" feels meaty in a way we're no longer used to. It's also the kind of movie that, because it does not advance "the art of the film" (God help us), may be ignored by some critics who prize aestheticism above all else. It may be a terribly extreme thing to say, but I don't think I could ever look at anyone who didn't feel something at this movie -- who dismissed it because of aesthetic flaws or the awkwardness of some of the dialogue -- and believe he or she was fully human. We know how little attention the West paid to the Rwandan genocide as it was occurring. The question now is, How much attention will be paid to this movie?

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