Blood Diamond
This is the kind of movie Hollywood makes to show you how smart, progressive and compassionate it is. It’s the attitude that informed George Clooney’s “Hooray for us!” Oscar speech. Yet if you can get past the smugness — that undercurrent of, “Hey, dummy, this is what happened in Sierra Leone in the 90s, and if you bought your girlfriend a big, overpriced engagement ring and didn’t ask whether it was conflict-free, you were sort of culpable” — “Blood Diamond” is a movie its makers have a right to be proud of. What’s better — a polished, engrossing, noble, flawed movie about Sierra Leone, or nothing at all? I’d say the former.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Danny Archer, a Zimbabwean diamond smuggler and former soldier who fought for apartheid South Africa in the Angolan civil war. Djimon Hounsou is Solomon Vandy, a fisherman whose village is attacked by the psychopathic goons of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (these are the guys who cut off people’s hands, symbolically denying them the ability to vote). While his son becomes a child soldier and his wife and daughters escape to a refugee camp, Vandy is sent to work in the diamond mines, where he discovers and buries a 100-carat pink stone. Jennifer Connelly is Maddy Bowen, a journalist who wants to expose the conflict diamond trade, using Archer as her source. Through a series of hard-to-swallow coincidences, these three are thrown together, and the diamond becomes the key to their fortunes.
It’s a workmanlike plot, one that uses these three gorgeous movie stars as composites of some of the players in the Sierra Leonean conflict: the apolitical African family man, brutalized by war; the jaded, amoral white African, willing to do business with either side; and the overwhelmed Westerner who looks with horror at the goings-on but isn’t sure what else to do. The director, Edward Zwick, is better at staging large-scale mayhem than telling a story with complexity or nuance, and the Sierra Leonean conflict comes to vivid and horrifying life. As an action movie, “Blood Diamond” is fantastic, and as a serious attempt to capture the messy soul of a continent it fares tolerably well, too. The dramatic expedience is forgivable in a movie that uses the power of megabudget commercial cinema to explore a serious subject. “Blood Diamond” is thrilling, but it’s no thrill ride; it’s got intelligence and guts.
There seems to have been a lot of grumbling about DiCaprio doing a Zimbabwean accent, and I think it’s misplaced. How many Zimbabweans have you actually heard speak? DiCaprio sounds enough like the golfer Nick Price to pass my test. Sure, he may mangle a word here or there, but it never takes you out of the movie, and he’s a fantastic actor, imbuing Danny with a hard-won cynicism and nervous fatalism. Danny is tough, confident and slick — but he’s fueled by desperation and pain, and DiCaprio can suggest all of his contraditions at once. Sadly, it’s the only great performance in the movie; like many directors, Zwick can’t quite figure out what to do with Hounsou’s outsize beauty and quivering intensity. He’s so gorgeous, so fierce, so strong, that he never quite feels real. Neither does Connelly; she says she’s harried and thrives on chaos but she looks like she just got back from the spa.
Zwick’s weaknesses are sentimentality and oversimplification, and both are on display here. His commitment to visual storytelling is impressive, but he also uses images to pander. And in a movie that effectively dramatizes the cruel capriciousness of life in Africa, Zwick commits to a pat ending in which justice is meted out in perfect proportion. Exciting as it is, you know where “Blood Diamond” is headed. Zwick is a showman, not an artist. He wants to make sure you leave provoked but satisfied.