The basic plot is not a million miles from “The Pianist,” in which we travel from Paul assuring his friends and family that people are not savages and the UN won’t let things get out of control, to desperation, power outages, dead bodies, and drinking from the hotel’s swimming pool. We survive one close call after another, as soldiers drive up to the hotel’s front door, ready to slaughter everyone inside. Paul bribes them with everything he has. The currency goes bad and he gives them beers and whiskey. He runs out and calls for favors, including his boss in Belgium (Jean Reno). All the while, Nolte and his UN peacekeepers keep coming and going. Paul is pitted against both the regular army, which is only fighting the Tutsu rebels, and the unruled mob, which is committing genuine genocide. Sometimes he manages to play them against one another for the sake of those in his hotel. He plans with his wife how to jump off the roof rather than face death at the hands of a machete. This might be the scariest movie of the year.
Irish director Terry George packs the movie with potent images. Streets are lined with bodies, parents search for children in Red Cross lines, and screaming black orphans are wrenched from screaming white nuns as the UN pulls out all the internationals. At one point, Nick Nolte and his handful of blue-clad soldiers are completely surrounded, with only their handguns to protect them. In preparing to meet their fate “Black Hawk Down” style, perhaps they reflect on what Lincoln said and wonder if some small bit of the cosmic balance will be repaid this day.
It’s natural to want to soften crimes our ancestors committed and to argue that we have not reaped the benefits of savagery. But we must take the good with the bad. The same men who wrote the Bill of Rights owned people. It’s in the language; we do a strange thing every time we say “we went to war with Mexico” or “we liberated Europe.” “We” did not do any of those things. The generation that did is gone or nearly gone, but by using that word “we” then we feel we must defend “our” actions. It’s natural to resist admitting what our forebears did. We are not guilty of such-and-such thing, but we live in comfort because of those who are. Bummer.
Finished Monday, February 14th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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