Fernando Gros

Blood Diamond

Blood Dia­mond is, for the most part, a grip­ping, visu­ally com­pel­ling and dra­mat­ic­ally power­ful film. The dir­ector, Edward Zwick (who dir­ec­ted the bril­liant, if often over-looked 1989 film Glory), con­structs a sense of ter­ri­fy­ing real­ism as we are dropped deep into the sense­less viol­ence that gripped Sierra Leone before the turn of the century.

We meet Solomon Vandy (Djimon Houn­sou) a fish­er­man, whose vil­lage is des­troyed by the ram­pa­ging RUF (Revolu­tion­ary United Front) forces. His son is taken as a child-fighter, his wife and daugh­ters flee into exile and he becomes a slave-worker in a dia­mond mine. There he dis­cov­ers a massive pink dia­mond, which he hides in the hope of buying sal­va­tion for his family. Through a chance encounter with soldier/mercernary turned dia­mond smug­gler, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) the story devel­ops as a quest to return to mine, reclaim the dia­mond and save Vandy’s family. Along the way they meet a reporter, Maddy Bowen (Jen­nifer Con­nelly), who serves as a love interest and moral-counterwright for Archer, as well as taking a per­sonal interest in Vandy’s plight. Super­ven­ing over them all is the omin­ous pres­ence of Col­onel Coet­zee (Arnold Vosloo), who is only roughly drawn. char­ac­ter, but serves as the military/ideological mentor for Archer, oper­ator of a private mer­cen­ary army and mani­fests the Mani­chaean real­ism of the film with his use of the phrase TIA (this is African).

The cine­ma­to­graphy (Eduardo Serra) is com­pel­ling and the ori­ginal score (James Newton Howard) is very effect­ive. Up until the final act, the film is every bit as good, if not better than any recent work in this genre. For me, this is DiCaprio’s best per­form­ance. Houn­sou (who stole the show in Gla­di­ator) dis­plays a phe­nom­enal emo­tional range. Con­nelly, who was cast against type in this role is con­vin­cing, espe­cially in the pho­to­journ­al­ism scenes.

For as long as the film remains focussed on Vandy and Archer’s jour­ney, the role Bowen plays in help­ing them and the alle­gi­ance Archer still feels towards Coet­zee, the film remains elec­tri­fy­ing and dra­mat­ic­ally potent. But, about three-quarters of the way through, it lurches badly and loses its power. The dual reas­ons why it does so are a case-study in the perils of con­tem­por­ary cinema.

First of all, Blood Dia­mond is what I call an Ethically-Driven film. In his review, Mark Ker­mode adop­ted the neo­lo­gism “issue-tainment.” Blood Dia­mond doesn’t just address the trade of con­flict dia­monds, but also the blood-thirsty nature of revolu­tion­ary con­flict in Africa, the lack of post-colonial recon­cili­ation, the role of private mer­cen­ary armies and the voyeur­istic tend­en­cies of west­ern media cov­er­age. It is a potent and worthy eth­ical cocktail.

But eth­ical dis­course and good story-telling don’t always over­lap. Blood Dia­mond starts by giving us an eth­ical con­text, the debate about con­flict dia­monds, but then immerses us in a very per­sonal story about a few indi­vidu­als trapped in an very spe­cific, very local con­flict. It’s when the film then pans back out, to recon­nect with the broader eth­ical point it is trying to make, that it starts to fall apart. From that point, the film becomes lam­ent­ably melo­dra­matic and preachy.

The first three-quarters of the film are so com­pel­ling because the eth­ical real­isa­tions arise as part of the nar­rat­ive. We are shown what is hap­pen­ing to the lives of the char­ac­ters. By con­trast, in the final move­ment, the film tells us what the prob­lems are, the char­ac­ters fall away to become mere meta­phors in the eth­ical debate. It’s an odd thing, but at pre­cisely at final moments when I was sup­posed to care most for the char­ac­ters, I cared less. It just felt con­trived and forced.

The key eth­ical com­mit­ment of the film is that most of the con­flicts fes­ter­ing in Africa are fueled by Euro-American demand for nat­ural resources. It’s a power­ful and seduct­ive thesis, because it sug­gests that if only we would change our pat­terns of con­sump­tion that would fix their prob­lems. It appeals to our sense of moral oblig­a­tion, fits within our com­mit­ment to con­sumer­ism but also, it deeply paternalistic.

This lim­it­a­tions of ethically-driven approach are made more acute by our cur­rent fas­cin­a­tion with “high-concept” film making. Many movies today are made so that the story canter-levers out from a very simple and tightly defined concept, often encap­su­lated in the title of the film. Snakes On A Plane, being the most clear example of this.

How­ever, the high-concept of con­flict dia­monds are not the most inter­est­ing thing about this film. The devo­tion of Vandy to his family, the rela­tion­ship between Vandy and Archer, Bowen’s moral struggles as a journ­al­ist and per­haps most of all, Archer’s tra­ject­ory from being a Rho­de­isan orphan, through the South African Army, to being a Pan-African smug­gler (not just dia­monds, but also arms) are the fuel of the story. But, because the “high-concept” had to drive the film, we are forced to return back to the begin­ning, back the to the “issue” of con­flict dia­monds, back to droll polit­ical con­fer­ences and press events and back to the fall of the con­cep­tual bad guys, the wealthy (west­ern) Dia­mond merchants.

Blood Dia­mond is an import­ant and worth­while film. Not just because of it’s poten­tial for water-cooler eth­ical debates or wear-a-t-shirt moral cam­paigns. There is some­thing deeper going on here, about the nature of story-telling and film craft, about the com­plex­it­ies of moral real­ism, about the intract­ab­il­ity of African con­flict and about our tend­ency to sound-bite answers to the prob­lems of the third world. It’s a great story under­mined by the need for clear-cut eth­ical “solutions.”

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Blood Dia­mond, Con­flict Dia­monds, Issue-Tainment

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 9:29 pm. It is filed under Film Reviews, Film Theory, Globalisation, Theology and Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.