No girl’s best friend
Movies
If Borat,
by all reports, leads the league in outrage, for somewhat different reasons the
new movie Blood Diamond may qualify as first runner-up. Essentially an
action-adventure thriller with a significant documentary component, the film
shows the cruel and dangerous business of mining, smuggling, and selling
African diamonds and, as a result, has provoked strong public reactions from
the industry at every level. Although an international agreement now prevents
some of the worst abuses, apparently many of the horrors that the picture
exposes continue in the present day.
Blood Diamond tells a number of stories, all related in one way or another to the search for
a large, pure diamond discovered by an African fisherman, Solomon Vandy (DjimonHounson),
enslaved by Sierra Leone’s
rebel militia. Knowing that if he can somehow keep the rock, he may find his
family, who fled the rebel attack, Solomon hides it and manages to escape the
vicious warlord who knows of his discovery. A part-time mercenary and diamond
smuggler — he likes to call himself a soldier of fortune — a Rhodesian
named Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) learns about
the jewel, and joins Solomon, swapping his experience and connections for a
share of the profits, and promising his new partner that he’ll help him rescue
his son, now a child soldier in the warlord’s army.
The long, complicated, and exceedingly dangerous journey to
locate and recover both the diamond and Solomon’s son occupies much of the
movie’s major action. With the help of a daring journalist, Maddy
Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), Solomon and Danny must lie, bribe, and shoot their
way out of an extraordinary series of chancy encounters with a variety of
adversaries — rebels, government troops, freelance thugs, and a well equipped
army of mercenaries led by Danny’s former commander.
Although the movie resembles one of those innumerable
cinematic adventures in search of some rare and precious object, it also
provides a quasi-documentary examination of the diamond trade, showing just
what the title means. The profits from the jewels finance the armed militias
that wage shockingly savage conflicts in several of the most volatile African
nations, particularly, in Blood Diamond,
the civil war in Sierra
Leone. The movie shows not only the
step-by-step operations of the diamond industry, but also the methods of the
militia that in the time of the action sought to control it — massacre,
torture, and the mutilation of children.
Despite the numerous narrative interruptions of the various
pursuits, escapes, and shootouts, the script displays an admirable attempt to
illuminate an important social, economic, and political problem that in the
recent past thrust some African nations into chaos. Danny educates Maddy about the diamond trade, but cynically perseveres in
his quest for the great jewel, which he regards as his ticket out of Africa, and whatever the dangers, he allows nothing to
deter him from the search.
One of the pleasant surprises of Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio, in the
sort of part that in the old days was played, though differently, by such
actors as Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable, performs more than adequately as the
soldier of fortune. Helped by a scraggly beard and unglamourous
clothing, he appears finally to have outgrown his postpubescent
androgyny and acquired some of the masculinity that American film demands of
its leading men. He undergoes a relatively acceptable character development
from selfishness to commitment to redemption in the great movie tradition and
imparts a measure of authenticity to the whole procedure.
The plot moves through several sequences of shocking
violence, with an almost rhythmic dependence on yet another massive militia
attack on innocent citizens whenever the action threatens to slow down or the
major characters find themselves in a hopeless situation. The director takes
pains to show not only the unspeakable cruelty of the various armed forces, but
also the unimaginable squalor of African poverty, especially in the urban
slums, part of it the heritage of a long history of colonialism. Its compelling
images of burning villages, armless children, files of refugees, wounded
victims, and scores of corpses resemble any television news report of recent
years, sadly demonstrating how cheap life has become in places most of us
neither know about nor care about, in landscapes steeped in blood and scarred
by suffering.
Blood Diamond (R), directed by Edward Zwick,
is now playing at Culver Ridge 16, Pittsford Cinemas, Henrietta 18, Webster 12,
Tinseltown,
Greece Ridge
12, and Eastview 13.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.
