In Blood Diamond, Edward Zwick, director of such previous white guilt epics as Glory and The Last Samurai, sends yet another white person into a foreign land to learn something about himself. The white person in question this time is Leonardo DiCaprio (in a truly outstanding, possibly career best performance and easily the best thing about the film) as Danny Archer, a former mercenary turned diamond smuggler. The tempest into which he is sent is the Sierra Leonean civil war of the late 1990s. And the lesson he has to learn, surprise surprise, is to appreciate life in all its bounteous splendor. The only question is how many dark skinned people are going to have to die before Danny figures that out.
I don’t want to be so cynical as to assume that Americans, particularly white middle-class ones, won’t watch a film with a mostly black (or foreign) cast. But I gotta think that even if it wasn’t Zwick’s idea from the start, somewhere along the line in the development of this very expensive film, someone would have made him put some white people in it just to make sure they showed up in the theaters. I don’t know whether Zwick was coaxed into making this concession (exhibits A and B: Glory and The Last Samurai, seem to indicate otherwise) but I understand it. It makes a certain awful kind of business sense. And when you get right down to it, that could even be forgiven if Blood Diamond had turned out to be compelling and interesting. But it isn’t.
It’s not compelling because, despite having an obvious message (diamonds reach our wedding fingers on the broken backs and spilled blood of the world’s exploited indigenous peoples) Zwick and Co. aren’t quite sure how to sell it. Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly, woefully out of her depth), a reporter who’s ventured into Africa to uncover the “truth” about the diamond trade, is obviously the filmmakers’ avatar for their belated activism. She’s the lone voice crying in the wilderness about the exploitation of the people and the ignorance of the selfish uncaring Americans back home. But a few scenes after making that speech, she’s snapping pictures of war ravaged bodies and grief stricken faces to publish in her magazine. How is that any less exploitative than what the diamond smugglers are doing? At least Danny has no pretenses about just what it is he’s doing there at the asshole end of the world.
It’s exactly that sense of conflicted purpose and misplaced anger that so muddies the film. And just when the politics become so convoluted that the whole thing is threatening to collapse under its own self-serious weight, gunfire erupts and something explodes. The camera shakes and blood and dirt splatter the lens as bullets rip through the air. But this, unfortunately, is the other major problem with Blood Diamond; namely that Zwick and Co. want the film to be a big bad piece of slam bang entertainment as well as a political message movie. So mixed in with all the hand wringing about the evils of the diamond trade are car chases and shoot outs in the streets as Danny and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, also fantastic and deserving of that Supporting Actor Oscar nod) travel the country in search of Solomon’s captive family and eventually to the hiding place of a rare pink diamond. But the big action setpieces and the complicated geopolitical maneuvering are never a perfect fit. The action seems to come out of nowhere and to exist for no other reason than that twenty minutes had passed without something exploding. It’s violence for violence’s sake is what I’m saying and it contradicts the whole point of Maddy’s (read: the filmmakers’) meandering speechifying that violence with no point is about as horrible a thing as people can do to each other.
All of that is not to say that there isn’t the occasional compelling moment in the film. The handful of scenes concerning Solomon’s captive son Dia, for instance, hint at the film that might have been. Kidnapped by the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.), Dia is brainwashed into thinking his parents are dead and then drugged into a stupor until he becomes an unthinking instrument of death. This being a big budget Hollywood spectacular and all, there is little doubt that Dia will eventually be reunited with his father and once again become the future of his country. But along the way, and almost in spite of itself, his becomes the most powerful story in Blood Diamond. His journey from untapped promise to wasted potential and back is the hoped for resolution to the mess that is most of war torn Africa. And thus Dia becomes something of a metaphor for the entire continent. Within him is the promise of a different future, but also the danger of endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past, an idea that is made all the more poignant by the fact that even today child armies continue to roam the jungles of Africa.
As the film draws to a close near the two and a half hour mark, the images of Dia killing innocent, helpless villagers are the only ones that linger, especially considering the somewhat self-defeating titles that close the film by describing the “Kimberley Process” that has, since the time in which the film takes place, supposedly ended the sale of conflict diamonds. Maybe that was tacked on as a sop to the diamond industry. Maybe it’s there to guard against potential lawsuits. Or maybe it’s there because it’s true. Whatever the reason, the contradictory note on which the movie ends is fitting for a film that never really figures out what it wants to say.
And maybe that’s how it should be. Because it’s a tricky quagmire, Africa is, and the filmmakers do not escape it unscathed. However, they do at least seem to be aware of the hopelessness of their plight. “This is Africa” (or just “T.I.A”) is an oft-repeated phrase throughout the film; the idea being that there is no explanation, no logic and no rules to explain what’s going on over there. I applaud their attempt to try to say something about Africa and to try to shine a light on a too-often dim part of the world. But good intentions are not nearly enough, especially when the finished product is so inconsistent, on the one hand bending over backwards to be self-congratulatory and on the other completely misunderstanding what it was actually saying.
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