 Hotel Rwanda tells the story of the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis by ruling Utus in Rwanda in 1994 from the perspective of Paul Rusesabagina, a Kigali hotel owner, played by Don Cheadle, who sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Stephen Holden in the New York Times writes that the movie "hammers every button on the emotional console." Perhaps too hard, he suggests. "The movie's sentimental excesses are forgivable, given the subject matter. But even as they trigger your tear ducts, you wonder if your emotional buttons have pushed been too hard and too often just to squeeze out an extra drop of sympathy." However, Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News almost appears to be responding to that criticism when he writes: "The excess is warranted to make the point that the people lost in the Hutu slaughter were indeed people of personal worth and dignity, not just numbers on a lost continent." On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, while praising Cheadle for delivering "the performance of a lifetime," concludes: "Hotel Rwanda is certainly an earnest, sincere, well-intentioned work. But partly by choice of focus, partly by weakness of execution, it is also a film that does not do the situation as much justice as we would have hoped for." |
