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Blood Diamond December 19, 2006 |
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Deep into “Blood Diamond”, the recent socio-political action-adventure from blockbuster humanist director Edward Zwick, we are taken to a refuge camp outside of Sierra Leone where, when all of the explosions stop, the chases cease, and the political ramifications of the film’s message begins to take over, a secondary character tells us, the world in the audience, that the conflict at hand – civil war fueled by the illegal smuggling of diamonds – would mean that much more to the outside world if they just knew the cost, in human life, the diamonds they buy has brought on an entire continent. “People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it cost somebody their hand,” says Jennifer Connelly, as do-gooder national magazine reporter Maddy Bowen, to her fellow travelers Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou, but you get the feeling it’s a line not intended to drive the action towards its conclusion, but to stick in the gut of the willful audience who have thus far witnessed many atrocities revolving around the mining of precious diamonds, and to make them realize, hopefully, that what they may see on TV news (“you might catch a glimpse of this on CNN,” says Maddy sarcastically, “somewhere between sports and weather”), isn’t enough to render the guilt factor high enough to change policy, but in high-brow fiction like this, with familiar faces spouting hard hitting “truths” about an industry shrouded in mystery, well then maybe we’ll start listening. This is the kind of moment that sticks out like a broken nose, even in a “message picture” with such a distinguished pedigree, because it literally dumbs down what we’ve been watching for the last 90 minutes, as if the filmmakers, needing to relieve the picture from the constant violence for a brief bit of duh-duh exposition, don’t trust the audience enough to realize that by now we understand that the wedding rings on our wives and the gems on our mother’s earrings just might possibly have come out of a slave labor camp deep in the African jungle, and that even though we hope it wasn’t the case, we’d likely go on as is, even with an expensive Hollywood action epic telling us to smarten up and change. I think the message was clear from the opening title page - “thousands have become refugees,” we’re told, “none of whom have ever seen a diamond” - and up to the refugee camp scene the film had done its part relatively smoothly in getting us to feel sympathy for the villagers and shame towards the diamond industry, but to go that one step further and nail it deep past the point of overkill (get this: slave labor is bad, diamond firms try to hide it, and American consumers choose to ignore it), virtually telling the audience what it should be feeling, and why, is almost unforgivable, and turns a pretty entertaining, and sometimes emotionally poignant action yarn into a grandstanding run-of-the-mill message picture with few easy answers, but plenty of quick fixes. “Blood Diamond” suffers the usual “message film” curse that its ultimate political ambitions come to overwhelm the characters and plot, leaving a two and a half hour epic with only lengthy action scenes and whatever emotion we can glean from its various lead characters to fall back on. In this case we fall back primarily on Djimon Hounsou’s Solomon Vandy, a poor village fisherman who is kidnapped by R.U.F. (Revolutionary United Front) rebels to work in the illegal diamond fields sifting through mud and water looking for the white stones that will further supply the R.U.F.’s civil war with the government. Vandy’s family has also been kidnapped, his son taken to a camp to train as a revolutionary rebel, and his wife and daughters set free to the ungodly overcrowded refugee camps of South Africa, and when he comes upon the most precious of diamonds, a pink 100 karat “blood diamond”, the plot sets in motion with various factions, including a government colonel (Arnold Vosloo), a rebel leader (David Harewood), and DiCaprio’s diamond smuggler Danny Archer all with their own plans for the priceless gem. Of course Vandy just wants his family back, Maddy Bowen just wants to tell the true story and stir some feathers within the diamond industry, and Archer, well we never really know what he’s up to, but it’s fun to watch DiCaprio play both sides of the fence, and in later scenes, when he and Hounsou form a tandem to retrieve the diamond from its hiding place, they form a kind of trust/mistrust relationship that highlighted the Matthew Broderick/Denzel Washington relationship in Zwick’s best film, “Glory”. Connelly comes into the picture as the voice of caustic reason, representing the crusading world journalism set that doesn’t necessarily get the time, or exposure of an Anderson Cooper or Geraldo Rivera, and as a romantic interest for DiCaprio (making quite the good looking pair) she’s suitably convincing with a homeless, on-the-road-all-the-time kind of loneliness about her, but her character fades rather quickly in the backstretch, leaving the adventure of the diamond retrieval, and DiCaprio and Hounsou to steal back the movie. I have a great admiration for the performers here, especially the two male leads who are generating deserved Oscar buzz for their impassioned turns (though DiCaprio fares better still with Scorsese’s “The Departed” than he does here with his on-and-off South African accent and shifty character traits), but I can’t help but feel, ultimately, that the picture was A) too violent, B) too long, C) too melodramatic, and finally D) much too contrived for its own good. As a message picture “Blood Diamond” triumphs in informing us of a tragic injustice, but how easily we get there, through grandstanding and dumbed down exposition, is the story’s biggest crutch, and one that unfortunately gets the better of even such fine performers as Djimon Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio. “Blood Diamond” is playing at the Quaker Crossing cinema in Orchard Park. by Adam Suraf
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