Film Reviews	He's a Rhinestone in the Rough: Blood Diamond by George Sax

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Trailer for "Blood Diamond"

Every so often, Blood Diamond seems on the verge of becoming really serious about its ostensible politico-moral theme. Edward Zwick’s big, blood-and-thunder movie is set in 1999 in Sierra Leone, amidst a brutally destructive civil war in which the insurgents financed their ragtail armed forces and campaigns through the illicit sale of diamonds. For about a decade, the rebels mined the diamonds with forced labor and smuggled them out to Europe for sale in the developed world, aided by hypocritically complicit executives in European and North American companies.

At Blood Diamond’s beginning, after a harrowing scene of killing and mutilation in an African fishing village, we’re shown a meeting of Group of Eight nations in London where the delegates politely discuss this dirty trade in “conflict diamonds,” and a diamond firm representative pointedly observes that the US accounts for two-thirds of the developed world’s diamond purchases.

Having established its serious intentions, the movie quickly moves ahead with its bankable, bang-for-the-buck story line, which it pursues with a nearly relentless pace. Blood Diamond is a product of careful calculation and expert execution, not to mention some real flair. To observe this isn’t to question, or quibble about, the filmmakers’ sincerity; it’s to recognize the movie’s roots in old Hollywood foreign-intrigue “mellers,” to use an antique, Variety-speak term for this kind of effort.

This movie does draw on some very ugly recent history to gain credence and to propel itself forward. Its action centers on a giant pink diamond found by one of the film’s three principals, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), an upright village fisherman. He has been captured by the barbarically brutish anti-government forces and put to work in one of its captured diamond mines.

Escaping after secreting the gemstone, he falls under the scrutiny of Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cynically charming, dangerously competent, Rhodesian-born soldier of fortune engaged in smuggling diamonds for a renegade South African army colonel. The illegal trade involves a Belgian firm which doesn’t scruple to buy and sell this bloody loot.

Solomon’s been keeping the secret of the diamond as possible leverage for the return of his young son, kidnapped by the rebels and remade into one of its civilian-murdering child killers. Archer and Vandy form an uneasy partnership to retrieve both the boy and the diamond. Along their carnage-strewn way they fall in with an idealistic American foreign correspondent (Jennifer Connelly) who wants the lowdown on the bloody origins of the diamond trade.

In constructing a high-impact adventure informed by moral insights, the filmmakers have, unsurprisingly, kept the emphasis on spectacle and action, much of it violent. Zwick’s movie has an impressively rendered natural scale and a convincing sense of the texture of its African setting. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s sometimes beautiful images have a subdued luminosity and, when the movie slows enough, he captures sharply evocative details. (The movie was shot in Mozambique.)

Zwick and screenwriter Charles Leavitt never really abandon their instructive purpose; they use Archer as an instrument of this enlightenment. He’s really an example of the good bad man, a perennial staple of film and popular fiction, and it’s to the movie’s credit that it scarcely softens Archer’s character until its end game.

What seemed problematic to me at the start was DiCaprio’s capabilities. I had to be won over by his performance to the recognition that this usually mechanically unconvincing, seemingly callow actor could persuasively impersonate a coldly decisive and unscrupulous character. He’s still no artistic threat to Robert De Niro, but he seems to have become a more than adequate leading man for muscular exercises like this movie. He even largely manages to sustain his white-Rhodesian accent.

The much less experienced Hounsou succeeds in keeping Vandy’s stock purity of heart from draining his performance of energy. Zwick never really creates much electricity out of the reluctant bonding of his two male protagonists, but maybe that’s intentional. There’s a little more warmth conveyed in a burgeoning attraction between Archer and Maddy, the reporter.

Blood Diamond ends on a high-minded tuitional note in a sequence of short scenes that’s reminiscent of the end of last year’s adaptation of John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.

Obvious good intentions notwithstanding, the movie’s lessons, delivered in part in one of those little postscript texts, don’t seem to be entirely to the point. Blood Diamond leaves us ignorant about where conflict gems are coming from now that Sierra Leone’s war is ended. (The chronically and disastrously unsettled Congo is another diamond-producing African state.)

The attendant publicity and journalistic coverage of this movie—USA Today’s spread, for example—are likely to be more informative to affluent, concerned consumers than the movie itself.