Eyes wide shut

There's nothing phony about Paul. The pride he takes in doing his job well is really pride in fulfilling his obligation to care for his family. In the course of "Hotel Rwanda," Paul's conception of family expands considerably. The real Paul Rusesabagina managed to shelter and keep alive more than 1,200 people in the Mille Collines during the 100 or so days of the genocide. "Hotel Rwanda" shows how Paul uses the skills of his job to save the lives of his family and neighbors and others, like the children a Red Cross worker (Cara Seymour) drops off at the hotel. At one point, Paul worries that all the refugees he is allowing to stay in the hotel will cost him his job. It's not his bravest moment, or his finest, but it's his most human. Paul cannot make the terrifying leap of realizing that everyday life as he knew it is over. "Hotel Rwanda" is about how he makes that leap without renouncing his decency. It's about how you remain a human being while the life around you is drowning in derangement.

The film is, unbelievably, Cheadle's first starring role, and it's his triumph. Cheadle plays a good man without turning him into a saint or making his bravery falsely noble, perhaps because he never divorces that bravery from an edge of desperate cunning. Cheadle is one of the few actors capable of making you believe that you are seeing him thinking. There is a way, when the solution to a problem appears to him, that he lifts his head and moves his eyes from side to side that makes you feel he has been following a slender thread through a nest of tangles and seen his way clear. That's why the moment when he loses his composure, a wordless panic in which this meticulous man cannot tie his tie, is so unnerving. Cheadle gives an intensely charismatic performance and one of the quietest, most modest portrayals of heroism in memory.

Terry George's refusal to show us the details of the slaughter is not squeamishness. It's the simple realization that there are some events so immense they can be depicted only in discrete pieces. The killings are suggested to us in quick cuts, often in long shots, and by images like a Hutu killer throwing down the empty helmet of a U.N. soldier (the Hutus killed 10 Belgian U.N. soldiers); Paul frantically cleaning blood off his young son and realizing, to his relief and horror, that it is not the boy's blood; a fleeting, surreal shot, glimpsed from a passing car, of the bodies of a murdered Tutsi family lying on their manicured suburban lawn.

What the movie is saying is not suggested but bluntly, forcefully stated. Deeply humane, "Hotel Rwanda" is nonetheless not a humanist movie. In an early scene, a Rwandan tries to explain to a visiting journalist (Joaquin Phoenix, who's so fresh he makes you feel that no one has ever played the part of a cynical reporter shocked into humanity by the events unfolding around him) the origins of the hatred the Hutus feel for the Tutsis. He explains that when the Belgians ran the country, they praised the Tutsis as more elegant, but perversely put the Hutus in charge when they left. It's an attempt to sketch in a bit of history, and it feels as if we're meant to reject it in the same way we reject the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of "Psycho."

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