In reviews of last year's Hotel Rwanda, critics described Nick Nolte's character as "cynical," "gruff," and "disgusted," but the man that character is based on—Canadian Lt. General Roméo Dallaire—can't really be reduced to a collection of types. Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey Of Roméo Dallaire lets the man speak for himself. The documentary takes its title from Dallaire's book, and its structure from his return to Rwanda on the 10th anniversary of a genocide campaign that left 800,000 dead over a hundred days. Dallaire's wife takes the trip with him, and watches with concern as he describes what real evil is, and how he tried to deal with it. Dallaire is a man of contradictions, complaining one minute that people who used to follow his command now treat him "like a goddamn tourist," and the next minute, becoming so overcome by memories that he can only whisper, "Oh shit."
Dallaire was in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1993 and '94, when the majority Hutus began routinely executing their ancient tribal enemies, the Tutsis. Ordered by the U.N. to do nothing—and faced with a global community afraid to risk a hundred of their own people's lives for the sake of 100,000 impoverished Africans—Dallaire watched the streets clutter up with dead, and did his best to alert the international media. Shake Hands With The Devil argues that the press was otherwise engaged, primarily with the O.J. Simpson trial, but the images that director Peter Raymont cuts together offer an alternate (perhaps unintentional) explanation. Stacks of macheted corpses are so overwhelmingly horrific that they become just so much abstract sculpture. It'd be hard for anyone to watch a 30-second clip of the massacre on CNN and attach souls to all those bodies.
Raymont himself puts some aesthetic distance between his documentary and the slaughter, laying syrupy music over shots of an impassive Dallaire, and cutting in testimonials from friends and colleagues who say things like, "I'd love to see Roméo free from the devils that haunt him." Raymont makes this story about one man, not 800,000, and any critics Dallaire may have had during his tenure are represented solely by file footage of a cranky Belgian senator. But Dallaire is a fine critic himself, as he explains how he bluffed his way through a miserable year in which his peacekeeping mission was reduced to mere observation. The value of Shake Hands With The Devil is in Dallaire's detailed recollections of what he observed: the anatomy of a mass murder.