Review: Blood Diamond
It's action-packed and looks great, and it certainly has its heart in the right place. But Blood Diamond, Edward Zwick's social-message drama about the role of the diamond trade in African wars, shortchanges its message by the way it tells the tale.
The story starts with Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a poor fisherman in Sierra Leone who is captured by rebels and sent to work in a diamond mine, where he finds a large diamond and keeps it for himself. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mercenary turned diamond trader, helps Vandy get the diamond out of Africa for his own reasons, while longtime war correspondent Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Garner) gets involved in the course of writing an expose of the trade.
The cause is worthy enough, assuming the situation is as bad as the film makes it out to be. Shot on location in South Africa and Mozambique, the film never looks false as it moves from gorgeous wilderness to grim urban settings. It's refreshing to see a natural attraction between two characters in dire straits (Archer and Bowen, cleverly named) not blossom into an unrealistic battlefield romance. (It's also nice that the obligatory beefcake shot of DiCaprio is matched by one of Hounsou.) DiCaprio's performance is phenomenal, showing great range, and Hounsou is also very good, though Garner falls flat.
Much is right with Blood Diamond, and it's worth seeing if you like adventure, don't mind blood and appreciate good acting of the man's-man variety. What's wrong with it surfaces early, in a scene where delegates to a conference on "conflict diamonds" lay out the problem with speeches that sound like stuffy documentary scripts. A privileged outsider's shock and anguish is spread thick over Blood Diamond, smothering the chance for a realism that goes beyond exposition and location shooting.
The lost opportunity for a more nuanced story is most obvious in Honsou's and Garner's characters. In the real world, a poor fisherman and a serial war correspondent would be more far more canny and less shocked by tragedy than these two. Maybe the makers of Blood Diamond thought they needed someone to model the audience's reaction to the story, like news anchors who emote about each item they report. A straight story with realistic characters would have made for a more powerful film; audiences could discern the tragedy here for themselves.
The story starts with Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a poor fisherman in Sierra Leone who is captured by rebels and sent to work in a diamond mine, where he finds a large diamond and keeps it for himself. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mercenary turned diamond trader, helps Vandy get the diamond out of Africa for his own reasons, while longtime war correspondent Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Garner) gets involved in the course of writing an expose of the trade.
The cause is worthy enough, assuming the situation is as bad as the film makes it out to be. Shot on location in South Africa and Mozambique, the film never looks false as it moves from gorgeous wilderness to grim urban settings. It's refreshing to see a natural attraction between two characters in dire straits (Archer and Bowen, cleverly named) not blossom into an unrealistic battlefield romance. (It's also nice that the obligatory beefcake shot of DiCaprio is matched by one of Hounsou.) DiCaprio's performance is phenomenal, showing great range, and Hounsou is also very good, though Garner falls flat.
Much is right with Blood Diamond, and it's worth seeing if you like adventure, don't mind blood and appreciate good acting of the man's-man variety. What's wrong with it surfaces early, in a scene where delegates to a conference on "conflict diamonds" lay out the problem with speeches that sound like stuffy documentary scripts. A privileged outsider's shock and anguish is spread thick over Blood Diamond, smothering the chance for a realism that goes beyond exposition and location shooting.
The lost opportunity for a more nuanced story is most obvious in Honsou's and Garner's characters. In the real world, a poor fisherman and a serial war correspondent would be more far more canny and less shocked by tragedy than these two. Maybe the makers of Blood Diamond thought they needed someone to model the audience's reaction to the story, like news anchors who emote about each item they report. A straight story with realistic characters would have made for a more powerful film; audiences could discern the tragedy here for themselves.
posted by Steve at
7:49 AM
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