Well-Intentioned, But Worthless Nevertheless

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The charming and capable manager of a four-star hotel, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), knows when to smile and accommodate, when to look the other way, when to comp a guest with a bottle or two of scotch. In the case of a local military officer who frequents the hotel bar, it’s always two, discreetly slipped into his briefcase on every visit.

Paul will soon be much in need of favors. It is 1994 at the Hotel Des Milles Collines in Kigali, Rwanda, a time and place where one cannot be on too good terms with a Hutu general. “Hotel Rwanda” is set against the backdrop of an ethnic cleansing that left approximately 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis dead at the hands of Hutu militias. The story, based on true events, concerns the efforts of Paul, a Hutu, to secure the Milles Collines as a refugee camp for local Tutsis, including several members of his family.

“Hotel Rwanda” was acclaimed as one of the most powerful selections of this year’s Toronto Film Festival, and opens on a wave of praise for its dramatization of a tough subject, and for the lead performance by Mr. Cheadle, who is considered a possible candidate for an Oscar nomination. Of late I have seen bad movies about Macedonian bisexuals, wise-cracking vampire killers, and irrelevant oceanographers, so it doesn’t please me in the least to say that I’ve now seen a bad movie – a very bad movie – about a good man at the center of the Rwandan nightmare.

It is unpleasant to admit that the insufferably flip “Ocean’s Twelve” is a more skillful and honest affair than “Hotel Rwanda,” but it does no one any good to pretend otherwise. Rarely has a film so well-intentioned been so worthless.

Films dealing with genocide bring to mind Wittgenstein’s famous proposition: “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.” Two of the greatest documentaries on the subject, “Shoah” and “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” approach their subject almost entirely through the speech of those who survived: They’re explicit inquiries into the capacity of language to address the unspeakable. The undiminished force of “Night and Fog” derives not so much from its unblinking footage of the camps, but the disturbing lyricism of its commentary.

In such films as “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist,” by contrast, the dramatization of historical horror becomes articulate through image, never through word: Both films gain strength the closer they come to silent-film strategies. The discovery of death camp machinery in “The Big Red One” overwhelms its protagonist – and audience – as a shock beyond words, as does a similar scene in Costa Gravas’s otherwise plodding “Amen.” The obligation of cinema is to give us articulate images, and terrible demands are placed on the maker of genocide cinema.

The director of “Hotel Rwanda,” Terry George, has the spatial elan of a mediocre television man; everything is flat, inertly staged, lacking texture. The impressions he gives us of the Rwandan crisis never stray from journalistic cliche: the angry “street” brandishing machetes; orphaned children dancing in a refugee camp; a procession of Tutsi fleeing a village. Compare such pat images with the bold visual ideas in “Amistad,” “ABC Africa,” or “Moolaade” – three films cognizant of their responsibility to articulate an intolerable African pain.

Mr. George further enfeebles his background by the astonishingly lazy device of contextualizing on-screen events with snatches of radio broadcasts, information that should be fused to the very bones of the narrative rather than pinned on like so many rhetorical brooches. He might as well have run a news crawl at the bottom of the image, updating the audience on the headlines of the hour.

Meanwhile, small roles played by Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jean Reno announce that movie stars care, they really do, so much so that delivering the worst performances of their careers is beside the point. Phoning it in, Mr. Nolte plays a kindly U.N. officer; seemingly intoxicated, Mr. Phoenix is a kindly journalist; no more than a screenplay puppet, Mr. Reno plays the kindly Belgian owner of the Milles Collines. All three make fools of themselves.

As for the reportedly triumphant performance of Mr. Cheadle, it is done with a convincing accent and features one or two scenes of crying. Performances should be judged for what they do and how they do it. The “what” of Paul Rusesabagina is so flawlessly noble it would make Stephen Spielberg blanche. Indeed, like “Schindler’s List” but to a far more egregious extent, “Hotel Rwanda” advances a disturbing kind of sentimental fascism: Paul is so selfless that it comes to seem as if the whole Rwandan tragedy was manufactured simply to provide a context for the purity of his heart.

The filmmakers cannot be accused of such an ugly motive, of course. Their heart is in the right place, but everything else is hopelessly out of whack. In a culture rank with the propaganda of bogus heroism, we don’t need another hero, at least not one this sappy and uncomplicated.

***

“In the Realms of the Unreal” tackles another difficult subject, the extremely private life of an extremely weird artist. For more than 60 years, the Chicago eccentric Henry Darger worked in total obscurity on an unclassifiable project: a bizarre novel of some 15,000 pages, together with several hundred related paintings, drawings, collages, and ephemera.

Perhaps no artist after Blake imagined such an extensive, evocative, and visionary private universe. Up to 10 feet in length, worked on both sides of taped-together paper, Darger’s mixed media paintings imagine the epic struggle of enslaved hermaphroditic children to overthrow their captors. By turns violent and tender, delicate and gruff, Darger’s fantasia is rife with psychosexual oddity and twisted Christian iconography.

There has been speculation that its maker was a child molester, even a serial killer. But little is known of his life. Documenting such a figure calls for an unusual approach. While filmmaker Jessica Yu makes standard use of archival footage and talking heads interviews, she finds an unusual way into Darger’s imagination by digitally animating his tableaux. Butterflies lift out of position and flit through the landscapes; figures stretch their legs in hot house gardens; wars come raging to life.

Initially irritating, particularly to anyone who admires Darger’s work, the gimmick succeeds to some extent in opening up the visual energies of this most private creation. Consider the alternative: endless montages of the digitally shuffled reproductions. The animation is sensitively done and technically adept, but the accompanying voiceover, whispered by child star Dakota Fanning, is an unwelcome affectation.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use