THE DOCUMENTARY- as-therapy format is nothing especially new – though recent political incarnations (like Errol Morris's The Fog of War) have raised some problems that films with more personal topics have been able to avoid. Shake Hands with the Devil tells Canadian general Roméo Dallaire's story of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and is based on the book of the same name he wrote recollecting the experience. Dallaire was in charge of the United Nations mission there, presiding over a tiny force, vastly underarmed and composed primarily of troops from Belgium, the country's former colonial occupier. Dallaire is astutely aware of the role the West played in stoking tribal animosity between Hutus and Tutsis, and he points out the disparity between the usual American response to white folks killing each other (for example, in Kosovo) and the deafening silence surrounding the massacre of 800,000 black Africans. After Belgium withdraws its troops, Dallaire pleads with the West for reinforcement to help prevent what he sees as the imminent danger to Tutsis and moderate Hutus, but is told by U.N. officials and the Clinton administration that they aren't looking to get involved in "another Somalia." This exposure of the failings of an international system motivated by profit and the battle for market share is valuable, and Dallaire helps poke holes in the theory that the U.N. is a body somehow above the fray of what United States foreign policy dictates. But Dallaire clings to the mythology of the West's roles as world savior and police force and is devastated by the incongruity between that conviction and the events that unfold in Rwanda. Bearing witness to this tragedy is powerful, but once that's over, director Peter Raymont is more interested in providing the best scenario for Dallaire's on-screen repentance, leaving only very limited occasion for a critical reflection on the general's own behavior. Dallaire's clinically verified, publicly displayed guilt is interpreted only as indication of his saintly inner nature, a conclusion that would benefit from some expansion into deeper questions about the U.N.'s role in preventing humanitarian crisis, and whether the genocide was really about "paradise assaulted by the devil." Raymont's documentary raises some relevant questions about whether we should let military leaders off the hook – regardless of how guilty they feel. (Rachel Odes)