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Movie Review – Blood Diamond
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend. But, just at the time of year when thousands of girls are expecting the beginning of a beautiful friendship, along comes director Edward Zwick with his savage film “Blood Diamond” to give lovers everywhere pause.
Zwick and writer Charles Leavitt want engaged couples to add one more “C” to the elements of choosing that special gem to adorn her left hand. They want them to think not only about color, cut, clarity and carat; but, also “conflict.”
As in, the brutal human cost behind 15% of the diamonds that reach the open market and represent millions of dollars available to fund armed combat killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions in strife-torn Africa.
The story is told from the perspectives of a smuggler and weapons runner trying to outrun his violent past, a reporter pursuing the truth about the connection between diamonds and war and a father desperately seeking wife and children ripped from him by the civil war in Sierra Leone.
Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) lost a mother and father to the violent transition of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. Army service in war-torn Angola further hardened his heart and conscience to violence and suffering. Now, in 1999, he has seen much blood spilled into the red soil of a country he believes he can escape after obtaining the riches to be had exploiting the barbarous struggles.
Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) wishes her writing could do more than motivate someone to give money to causes. She wants to wake sleeping hearts, focus unseeing eyes and open closed minds. She knows there’s a blood bath coming; and when she meets Danny, she hopes she has met someone who understands what is at stake and can help her sound the alarm.
Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a fisherman with dreams of a homeland becoming peaceful and a son becoming a doctor. But rebels have other plans for Solomon and his family. Wife and children are forced into crowds of refugees on the road; while Solomon escapes the fate of others losing hands to machetes (“The government wants you to vote…so we take your hands; no more voting!”) and is forced miles from home to search for diamonds along a muddy river with hundreds of other men and boys.
Later, Solomon’s son Dia will be gang pressed into the rebels’ ranks of boy soldiers indoctrinated and trained to hate and murder. Escape, rescue, disclosure, peace all seem unobtainable dreams amid the hellish madness gripping the country and turning men into beasts. Men like the mining camp commander who discovers Solomon has found and is trying to hide a huge, rare, pink diamond. The commander sees the diamond as his way out. He vows to kill Solomon’s family if Solomon does not reveal where the stone is. But, Solomon defies every threat with his steadfast determination to survive and find his family.
A brief stay in a prison cell links him to Danny, who has been detained after trying to take diamonds he received as payment for grenade launchers across the border into Liberia. Danny bullies Solomon into agreeing to swap the diamond for help getting to his family. Danny’s grim expediency when it comes to self-preservation and his single-minded goal of the diamond save them from several near-fatal encounters on a journey that eventually crosses Maddy’s investigative path.
Although Maddy feels Danny’s amoral profiting from the war is reprehensible, she nevertheless knows he is her best hope to get the proof she needs about blood diamonds. And, she is falling in love with this complex man; as he is with her. With stolen weapons from South African soldiers poised to strike at the rebels, Danny and Solomon set off for the diamond mine and a rendezvous with a courageous destiny to change not just one man’s conscience, but the conscience of the world.
Zwick flinches when it comes to depicting the total depravity of the rebels’ child soldiers; but there is much on the screen to sicken the heart and to inspire. There is a touch of the pedantic and superficial mouthpiece in the character of Maddy; and there are references to other films about unlikely heroes like Casablanca and For Whom the Bell Tolls that stick out like sore thumbs.
But, with superlative acting and passionate purpose, this is a film that can cut like a diamond into every person’s soul. A Warner Bros. release, rated R for strong violence, language.
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