Film
If you watched Hotel Rwanda wondering why Nick Nolte's UN commander never just, hell, started shooting, Peter Raymont's devastating documentary Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire comes as a fierce rebuke. As the commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, the Canadian general arrived with noble intentions. After sitting by, hands tied by distant bureaucrats and indifferent diplomats, while ethnic Hutus butchered the ruling Tutsis and their own moderates by the hundreds of thousands in 1994, he left a heartbroken, disillusioned and suicidal man.
Raymont follows Dallaire 10 years later as he treks back to Rwanda, where all he sees are the signposts of genocide and international apathy—and the graves of his fallen troops, whose deaths were widely placed on his head. Many (perhaps too many) people testify to Dallaire's valor and moral fiber, but the movie is more convincing as penance than absolution. The movie's most haunting images, aside from scarifying footage of corpse-lined streets and Hutus efficiently slaughtering their prisoners with machetes, are of the retired general returning to sites that confront him with the vastness of the atrocity. In one bunker, table after neatly lined table serves as a repository of human skulls; Dallaire's wife notices that many of the (obviously cracked) skulls look small.
That's one of the few occasions in the movie where any reminder of the individual emerges from the atrocity's enormity. Eight hundred thousand dead in 100 days boggles the mind, let alone the conscience: the method of genocide is to generate murder on such a massive scale that the victims register only in the abstract—as stats. Focusing on Dallaire does little to replace figures with human beings. But watching him wander through present-day Rwanda like a ravaged ghost suggests the burden of guilt the rest of the world will shoulder for decades to come. Movies like this (or Hotel Rwanda) always seem to arrive 10 years after they're needed. But it's a solemn reminder that while the West fiddles, the devil is busy shaking hands in Darfur.
Slow-blooming Broken Flowers
Bill Murray's recent performances are studies in how much an actor can convey doing as little emoting as possible. His style meets its match in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, a tragicomedy so deadpan that a half-raised eyebrow registers as a pie fight. Murray has what a movie a few years back called "funny bones," meaning he could get laughs doing nothing but sitting there; Jarmusch puts him to the test, casting him as an aging Lothario in a near-catatonic post-breakup funk. After a mysterious letter informs him he has a 19-year-old son, Murray's blank hero, Don Johnston, revisits women from his past to find which one was the mother. The journey starts as a poker-faced goof on detective movies, as Murray drives around in cool shades listening to jazzy music and pursuing half-baked clues. (Do not take this description for action.) It deepens as his past erases itself with each new encounter, and the idea of a son becomes more than a McGuffin.
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The line between broad and minimalist barely exists when the gifted Jarmusch is working in the enervated hipster-vaudeville mode that marred sections of his last film, Coffee and Cigarettes. At worst, he introduces people as caricatures and then caricatures them: a flirty nymphet (Alexis Dziena) introduces herself as Lolita, Murray acknowledges that her name is Lolita (heh heh)—and then she acts like a Lolita. The women characters in general are feebly drawn, given spark mostly by unruly presences like Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone. But the flickers of life, or just dawning feeling, in Murray's performance add up almost imperceptibly. By then end, when Don's silence comes to mean something more than dull passivity, you may feel as if you've sat in the dark for an hour, unaware that the sun was rising the whole time.