Netflixing: Blood Diamond

This film was added to the queue in antic­i­pa­tion of Ed Zwick’s Defiance, which I ended up see­ing and hat­ing enough to add a few dozen other DVDs to the top posi­tion in the mean­time. I’m pretty tough on Mr. Zwick, espe­cially after the dis­as­ter of The Last Samulrai, but Blood Diamond, which is flanked by those two ter­ri­ble releases, is some­thing else entirely. Certainly, the movie is full of his own bom­bas­tic style: things blow up, women bring redemp­tion to men, and there are plenty of tears and soppy music. However, this is a film with a true heart, and a mes­sage that is seem­ingly more vital than most polit­i­cal drama­ti­za­tions that are released while a con­flict rages on.

The story fol­lows two men, Daniel Archer and Solomon Vandy. The first is a white dia­mond smug­gler and self-proclaimed sol­dier of for­tune played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The sec­ond, played by Djimon Hounsou, is a black fish­er­man who becomes entan­gled in both Sierra Leone’s civil war and the inter­na­tional dia­mond trade when his vil­lage is attacked by rebels. They are both African, and that is the point.

It seems as though Mr. Zwick sets out to make Gone With The Wind on every out­ing. He finds sin­gu­lar bits of schmaltz amid nations brought to the brink of armaged­don and uses them as his macguf­fin to, well, blow a bunch of shit up and teach us all a les­son by the end of the pum­mel­ing. If ever this tac­tic works, it works best in Blood Diamond. Most of where this film stands apart is in the actind. Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Hounsou bring a great deal of heart to the table. Archer as the cold hearted cynic who, sur­prise, light­ens up a bit by the end, and Vandy as the lov­ing man-child who dreams for a sim­pler world, where he could live in peace with his family.

My favorite moments in this film is a scene where Archer must pre­tend to be a jour­nal­ist and Vandy must pose as his cam­era­man so that they may get a free ride towards the giant dia­mond around which the film cen­ters. Bear in mind, at the point, Vandy has lost his fam­ily, his home, and he has very litt­tle to gain by find­ing the dia­mond any­how. Still, he pulls Archer aside and yells at him “I can­not do this!” He is refer­ring to lying. The scene is both heart-warming and heart break­ing, but in the end I found myself chuck­ling. The film would be bet­ter with more of this, but that is all we get.

I absolutely rec­om­mend giv­ing this one a view­ing if you haven’t yet.