Early in “Blood Diamond,” it becomes ethically crucial that the action-soaked tale about Africa’s illicit and brutal diamond trade end with at least one outcome guaranteed.
Edward Zwick’s movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou as two men bound together – one by need, the other greed – must make a sacrifice or commit its own sin of complicity. It’s no spoiler to write that this not-quite- perfect gem does the honorable thing.
And in balancing its major motion picture ambitions with thoughtful intentions, this compelling, neo-message movie offers a fresh T-shirt motto for the ongoing campaigns against diamonds that help finance corruption and slaughter: Do the Right Bling.
It’s 1999 and Sierra Leone is plunging deeper into civil war. Smuggled rough diamonds help foot the bill, arming not just the government but the rebels as well.
Diamond smuggler and arms trader Danny Archer (DiCaprio) becomes interested in Solomon Vandy (Hounsou) when he hears that Vandy has found and hidden the diamond of his dreams. The fisherman was imprisoned by rebels at a mining site after his village was attacked. He was separated from his family. His 12-year-old son, Dia, was conscripted into chaos by a rebel officer.
The Kimberley Process, a 2002 United Nations-sponsored attempt to prohibit “conflict diamonds” from being sold, doesn’t stop the gems from making it to market. In this case, they also make it into the safety deposit boxes of a London-based company that has rigged a stranglehold on supply.
Stanley Kramer, master of such Hollywood message movies as “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” never had the explosive tools Zwick employs. Yet, Archer and Solomon are updates on Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis’ escaped inmates in Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones.” Only these defiant ones are bound not by chains but by a colonial past and a place where cynics and opportunists explain away mayhem with the quip “TIA” – “This is Africa.”
Neighboring Liberia, with a scant diamond industry of its own, is making billions on the gem. Hmmm.
Jennifer Connelly plays Maddy Bowen, the American journalist who follows up “hmmms” with pointed questions. Indeed, much of this talkative film’s factual information about smuggling and corruption come via mini-debates Maddy and Archer carry on.
One of writer Charles Leavitt’s snappier bits of dialogue takes place when the two first meet – cute then prickly – at a Freetown bar:
“You’re an American?” he asks, sucking on a cigarette.
“Guilty,” Maddy says almost batting her fab blue eyes.
“Most Americans are.”
Our American presence is in the details. It’s particularly prevalent in the rough rap songs the child soldiers use as personal soundtrack for their adrenalized attacks on innocents.
The most chilling scenes depict young boys transformed into AK-47-wielding killers. It’s simple method, really: Strip the children of everything – parents, siblings, sense of self – then rebuild them in your own contorted image of masculinity. Drugs, CDs, booze and no curfew are the tools used to barter for their souls.
“Blood Diamond” goes only so far in interrogating the gendered foundations for this out-of-whack world. After all, the narrative understandably but tacitly accepts the heightened value of boys over girls, sons over daughters.
Connelly has a few tart lines that offer an alternative viewpoint. But the way the movie handles this gifted actor suggests an old-school disregard for Maddy’s truer grit.
As for DiCaprio, sometimes an actor’s range is revealed most in tiny gestures. On a bluff above the rebel camp, the way he looks through the binoculars, a little thing he does with his mouth, declares just how fully he inhabits Archer’s body, his mercenary talents and point of view.
Zwick doesn’t retreat from showing mayhem that shatters – or should. But James Newton Howard’s score throbs when it should be still. Let the misery go unaccompanied; squirming in our seats is the least we can do.
Zwick and longtime editor Steven Rosenblum do pull off a succint and impressive sequence as they juxtapose an all-too-civil G8 conference on diamonds and the attack on Solomon’s village. Montages can be cut to dazzle. This one wisely builds a visual argument for First World pleasantries and Third World disasters.
No wonder the movie has some in the diamond trade fretting.
With sincere apologies to Tom Shane, “Blood Diamond” makes it clear that the world has more than one fiend in the diamond business.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“Blood Diamond” | *** RATING
R for strong violence and language|2 hour, 18 minutes|MUSCULAR MESSAGE MOVIE|Directed by Edward Zwick; written by Charles Leavitt; photography by Eduardo Serra; starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Michael Sheen, Arnold Vosloo, Kagiso Kuypers, David Harewood|Opens today at area theaters
