The Interpreter / Hotel Rwanda
Cry, The Beloved Continent
What is the proper moral response towards genocide in Africa?
If you’re asking me, I can’t tell you, or I can’t tell you much, and that’s after seeing The Interpreter and Hotel Rwanda basically back-to-back. (The movie in between was a rental of Starsky and Hutch, but that hardly counts.) I don’t know what to think, and I doubt that you do, either.
Having said that, it is terribly easy to move on from the question. I don’t know what to do about genocide in Africa, so let’s move on to the next question. What do we think about the filibuster of judicial appointees? What do we think about the Yankees paying Kevin Brown all that money to suck as badly as he’s doing? Isn’t the new Star Wars movie coming out?
There is so much going on in the world to distract us from what is important, and one of those important things is genocide in Africa. And you can’t get around it, you can’t avoid it, because it is still going on, right this minute, in Sudan. (The Hotel Rwanda DVD starts with a message from Don Cheadle about Sudan, and he co-wrote a powerful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to that effect.) And before it went on in Rwanda, genocide went on in Somalia. Black Hawk Down portrayed how that particular Western moral response to genocide went — badly. Hotel Rwanda has its Western ambassador, an impotent Canadian colonel played by Nick Nolte, point this out to explain why the Western countries won’t have their soldiers set foot in Rwanda to stop genocide.
(I suppose, in a way, it’s at least comforting to know that even in Africa, they don’t know what to do about genocide. In checking up on the current news out of the Sudan, I ran across this item in afrol News where they had a big-time regional summit to decide what to do about Darfur, and the only thing anyone could agree on was that the US should not send troops to do anything about it. And if that isn’t insane enough for you, apparently the main peace broker between the rebels and the government is going to be Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi, who is, famously, a few stripes short of a full zebra.
So what is the proper moral response towards genocide in Africa?
Well, one of the possible moral responses is to make a movie about the whole appalling subject. This is what Terry George and Sydney Pollack have done, respectively, with Hotel Rwanda and The Interpreter. The problem of African genocide links both films, but there’s more than just that superficial resemblance. Both films feature as their main characters enigmatic, stylish, middle management types who are drawn into dangerous and life-threatening situations through cryptic code words. Both the ficticious Sylvia Broome of The Interpreter and the real-life Paul Rusesabagina of Hotel Rwanda are safe, boring, middle-class functionaries. His job as the assistant manager of a large luxury hotel in Kigali is to be obsequious; hers, as an interpreter at the United Nations, is to be invisible. Both are fundamentally outsiders in their chosen environments. (Rusesabagina’s home is very American; Broome’s New York apartment is very African.)
Both characters are, of course, played by great actors. Don Cheadle got an Oscar nomination, and Nicole Kidman might have scored one if her movie had been released during Oscar season, in a lean year. And though their situations and stations are vastly different, they’re surrounded by some of the same characters — hard-bitten, world-weary types assigned to defend them (Nolte’s Canadian colonel and Sean Penn’s hangdog Secret Service agent) as well as smooth African politician types (Fana Mokoena as a Rwandan general and George Harris as a smooth exile politician).
But one of the characters is real, and that makes all the difference. (Anyone who believes that the events in the last five minutes of The Interpreter could have happened, just that way, needs to have their reality sensors checked out.) The reality-based Hotel Rwanda begins with the cusp of the conflict between the Hutsi and the Tutus. No. Wait. That’s not right. It is the Hutu and the Tutsis that are fighting one another. It’s an understandable mistake; the movie itself sets up the idea that there is no difference between the two groups, that any difference is totally attributable to the negative influences of colonialism. As long as people of goodwill predominate, the differences between Hutu and Tutsi are miniscule. (They certainly seem that way to Paul Rusesabinga, who is a Hutu married to a Tutsi.)
But — for no explicable reason — those differences are enough to kill over. As the murderous madness starts (incited by a local pirate radio station inciting Hutu violence), Rusesabagina’s neighbors show up at his house, asking for protection. As the movie progresses, his hotel becomes a sort of sanctuary for refugees — at first, because the United Nations contingent is there, and later, even though it is not.
Hotel Rwanda, wisely, chooses not to focus on the death and destruction and genocide, but on the moral courage of one man, and that it does spectacularly well. Rusesabinga starts the movie out as the next thing to a collaborator, looking the other way as a neighbor is dragged to his death by police. He is forced into the role of a protector when his own life, and the life of his family, is threatened, and grows into the role, to the point where he is the only one holding back the forces of darkness and ignorance. And Cheadle’s down-to-earth performance — descending at times into a shaking nervous breakdown — keeps the proceedings on an even keel. Cheadle never allows Rusesabinga to ascend to saintliness, but reminds us again and again of his ordinariness in extraordinary conditions.
To say too much about Hotel Rwanda in terms of a plot is to misunderstand things. Horrible and awful things happen, and horrible and awful things are said, and everything about it is so terribly compelling and riveting because we understand that it is real. For The Interpreter, though, everything is flapdoodle. It is inferior not only because it is phony but because it is pretentious as well.
The Interpreter begins in Africa, with scenes of a small genocide in a fictional country. The action takes place in a deserted soccer stadium, and one is reminded not just of African genocide but of the Taliban’s use of a soccer stadium for executions, and of the torture of athletes under the Hussein regime in Iraq. But the scene quickly shifts to New York, with Nicole Kidman watching the proceedings of the General Assembly from a luxury box, translating meaningless speechifying in Spanish to diplomatic gibberish in English. (Kidman here has to pull off a South African accent, which she manages nicely.) After a security scare, Kidman returns to her luxury box to pick up her bag. She overhears a conversation on the floor of the deserted General Assembly, in a language that she (almost alone) understands, and it frightens her. Later, when she finally figures out the full import of the conversation, she reports it to the authorities.
This is where Sean Penn comes in, and he makes an entrance — sitting on a barstool, then dragging himself over to a jukebox, turning it off, and then switching it over to a Lyle Lovett song, the better to drink by. We learn, later, why he’s brokenhearted, and why he is determined to press on irregardless, and (maybe) why he is so antagonistic to poor little Nicole Kidman, lost in the big city. Penn doesn’t believe her story, but he is determined to protect her anyway. Kidman doesn’t especially want the protection — or Penn’s attitude — even though she is revealed to be in actual danger. Only Penn can protect her, but she doesn’t trust him, putting her into more and more dangerous situations.
And again, to talk about the plot is to misunderstand things. What The Interpreter is about is Nicole Kidman as a damsel (and what a damsel she is) in distress, and Sean Penn (of all people!) as the white knight that must rescue her again and again from dangers. And since Kidman can’t be allowed to be a passive witness, some of these dangers have to be of her own making — partly by not telling Penn everything he needs to know, and partly by putting herself directly in the line of fire.
While The Interpreter is a perfectly servicable date movie, with its share of thrills and spills and misdirections, it is essentially tame and unserious fare. It would like to be, one supposes, much more serious and high-minded than it is, and make a real point about the problems of Africa and the wider world, but it instead settles for a make-believe unreality. And in this, it is a bit like the United Nations itself. The Interpreter makes something of a fetish of the UN. Indeed, it’s the first movie ever to be allowed to shoot inside the hallowed precincts of Turtle Bay. Kidman’s character tells us that she joined the UN as an interpreter to help make peace in Africa. Hotel Rwanda lets us know just how well that worked out.
What should conclude this review is a conclusion. But I don’t have one, at least not for the question of what to do about genocide in Africa. Hotel Rwanda doesn’t have a solution, just a plea not to let things continue. The Interpreter, sadly, doesn’t have a clue. What we are left with is a boundless void of chaos and murder and devastation, which desperately needs to be filled with… something. And against this void, Hollywood has little to offer, and movie criticism has even less.