Hotel Rwanda

Hotel Rwanda
Opens Fri., Jan. 7, at Metro and Uptown

In Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversations, the wisest meeting of movie minds since Hitchcock/Truffaut, Murch describes the day he rediscovered the legendary lost version of Apocalypse Now: hours of film in which the protagonist is not Martin Sheen but Harvey Keitel, who left after a month's work. The difference that made the finished movie was Sheen's eyes: "Marty has an openness to his face, a depth to his eyes, that allowed the audience to accept him as the lens through which they were able to watch this incredible war. Keitel is perhaps more believable as an assassin, but you tend to watch him rather than watch things through him." Those eyes have lately enabled Sheen to play the wildest dream of half of America on The West Wing: a president with a human face.

Don Cheadle's face has a still more humane openness, and eyes deep enough to reach his soul—and yours. Even when he's playing a disreputable lout, as in Devil With a Blue Dress, his eyes enable him to steal the picture out from under Denzel Washington's generic matinee-idol look. Cheadle tackles the challenge of a lifetime in Hotel Rwanda—or rather, of almost a million lifetimes. That's how many were cut short in 1994 when the African nation's Hutu tribesmen murdered their Tutsi neighbors, who had earlier murdered and oppressed them. Americans tend to blame such tribal strife, in Africa or Iraq, on the intrinsic savagery of the local primitives because most of us don't know how the West created Rwandan and Iraqi ultra­tribalist strife with its self-serving new colonial map, forcing enemies together and smashing delicate ancient balances of power. Later, the West was too coldhearted to intervene as Hutus hunted Tutsis in the streets, because to do so would mean admitting the error, and true cost, of those boundaries.

How can mass madness be dramatized? Through the eyes of one man, Paul Rusesa­bagina, manager of the Hotel Des Milles Collines in Kigali, the haute spot of Rwanda's capital city. Cheadle makes the unbelievable, unassimilable horror real by mirroring it in the large, liquid, extraordinarily intelligent eyes of Rusesabagina, who really saved about a thousand people against all odds as machete-brandishing killers and victims swarmed his hotel and loudspeaker trucks roamed the countryside urging death to the "Tutsi cockroaches." Schindler had an easier go of it: His Nazi bosses were such order freaks that his factory's machinelike efficiency kept them at bay. But Rwanda's ordinary chaos erupted into free-floating mindlessness in 1994.

And how does Rusesabagina pull it off here? By hypnotizing the thugs into thinking that the top hotel in town was and should remain an oasis of humanity on its best behavior, an island of responsibility in a gory sea of anything goes. Only the single moral searchlight of his gaze convinces the killers that the protective light of international law shines on the hotel. He reads everyone's mind, bribing this killer with 25-year-old Scotch, that one with flattery, another with calibrated threats likely at any instant to get his own Hutu ass killed—and also his Tutsi wife and half-"cockroach" children. With a crucial little bit of help from a rebellious U.N. commander (Nick Nolte), he proves that you can negotiate with terrorists—you just have to be subtler and smarter than they are.

Hotel Rwanda is worth seeing for a performance that, if it doesn't nab an Oscar nod, will disgrace the AMPAS. As for the rest of the film, director Terry George quite lacks Cheadle's gift for nuance and subtlety. He previously co-wrote the screenplay for Jim Sheridan's simplistic In the Name of the Father, and he's an aesthetic simpleton here, too. Even so, his great and criminally underrated star goes far toward opening our eyes to hearts of darkness—including our own. (PG-13) TIM APPELO

Purple Butterfly
Runs Fri., Jan. 7–Thurs., Jan. 13, at Grand Illusion

Lou Ye's 2000 Suzhou River daringly transplanted Vertigo to Shanghai and transformed the city's canals into an urban stream of consciousness. Following the misty River further into genre territory, his Butterfly is nearly as waterlogged and no less stylish—part action flick, part love story, and part posh historical pageant. (The film was trimmed and revised after its unsuccessful Cannes '03 debut.)

This wildly impressionistic period thriller—set before and during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai—stages Hong Kong gunplay against a moody Herrmann-esque score. Even more adroit in its soft jump cuts than River, Butterfly is a fabulously morose piece of work, perversely filled with time-wasting gazes and cigarette-shrouded silences. The abundance of close-ups is complemented by the paucity of dialogue—as well as a tendency to erupt into extended bursts of chaotic violence.

The only constants are the perpetual monsoon soaking Shanghai and actress Zhang Ziyi's tragic beauty as a Chinese partisan. Little is said but much is revealed as successive waves of emptiness and paranoia wash over her face and that of the Japanese agent (Toru Nakamura) she takes as a lover. Covers are blown, then minds. Finally, as gunfire breaks out, the entire nightclub erupts in a dance of death—a metonym for the movie itself. (R) J. HOBERMAN