BLOOD DIAMOND
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As Heard in the Film review by Clark Douglas: If there was an award given out for "Most Earnest Film of the Year", "Blood Diamond" would surely win. No, I take that back, "Bobby" would win, but "Blood Diamond" would come in second, at least. It's message is a fairly potent one, but it tries so hard to squeeze your emotions that it trips up, repeatedly. It is most assuredly a mixed film, in which the highs are remarkable and the lows are embarrassing.
Set it Sierra Leone in the late 1990's, when civil war was at large, the film follows the stories of three key characters. The first is Solomon (Djimon Hounsou), a local fisherman who is torn from his family by the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group. The R.U.F. forces Solomon to be their slave, making him work in the diamond fields. Solomon comes across an extraordinarily valuable pink diamond, and hides it away. The R.U.F. knows that Solomon has hidden the diamond, but before they can force him to dig it up for them, Solomon is thrown into prison in a government raid.
It's in the prison that Solomon meets Danny Archer (Leonardo Di Caprio), a free-living, amoral diamond smuggler with a charming personality. He's the guy who gets the "conflict diamonds" into other countries, who in turn sell the diamonds to retailers, so it will seem like the diamonds are from conflict-free areas. When Danny hears about Solomon's diamond, he promises to help find Solomon's family as a trade. To do this, Danny must employ the services of an American reporter (Jennifer Connelly), who in turn wants Danny to provide her information about how the diamond smuggling business works.
Meanwhile, Solomon's son has been captured by the R.U.F., and is being trained to become a merciless warrior. This leads to a question... if Solomon does find his son, will he be able to win him back from the R.U.F. officials who have brainwashed him? This is the film's most poignant plotline, a genuinely moving story that is generally washed over the supposed "bigger picture", the diamond smuggling.
The performances in the film are a mixed bag. Di Caprio's soldier of fortune is fairly convincing, and the South African accent is pretty sharp (a little better than Tim Robbins’s in "Catch a Fire", this year's other super-earnest African drama). As in "The Departed", Di Caprio does a good job becoming his character, we quickly forget that he's "that whippersnapper from Titanic". Hounsou is all rage and passion as Solomon, and gives every scene all he's got, but the character is underwritten. A great performance is partially wasted by weak character development. The Connelly character is the least interesting... she serves as a mouthpiece for Zwick's political ideals, giving numerous bleeding-heart speeches about how Americans (we get blamed for all of the world's problems nowadays) "wouldn't buy diamonds if they knew it was costing someone an arm." As I have had to do several times this year, I must note that I absolutely do not disagree with Zwick's beliefs, in fact, he's absolutely right about the need to make sure our purchases are not funding bloodshed. However, he employs the "words speak louder than actions or images" style of filmmaking, having someone spout out every single point that has all ready been forcefully implied in more subtle ways.
One of the most laughable examples of this is the rap song that plays over the end credits, "Shine on 'em", performed by rapper Nas, with music provided by James Newton Howard, who also wrote the score for "Blood Diamond". The song is a ridiculous piece of nonsense, with Nas going on about the need to wear bling-bling that isn't going to hurt anybody. It's got all the subtle nuance of a jackhammer, and conflict diamonds don't exactly make great song material, either.
The score is a pretty interesting affair, as Howard brings a lot of African influences to the fore. The first half of the film is particularly dominated by pieces featuring heavy African rhythms and instrumentation, which adds authenticity to the setting. The second half is more enjoyable from a pure listening standpoint, but perhaps less effective in the film, as Howard's Media Ventures-style main theme emerges. It's fairly simplistic, but memorable. What I heard of the action music really impressed me, intense and hard-hitting material, but it's often buried under the noise of gunfire, so it's a bit hard to tell. Zwick's films have drawn great scores from James Horner and Hans Zimmer, but Howard's score is merely good, nothing more.
Perhaps the film's most fatal flaw is its poor sense of pacing. Zwick displays a startling lack of self-control here, trying to squeeze in an emotional climax every five minutes, and jumping into chases and gunfire even more often. Perhaps he's trying to give the viewer an idea of the constant intensity of the setting, but he does so at the cost of the film's effectiveness. By the time the finishing series of climaxes arrive, we're worn out, and don't really care all that much. Plus, it seems unusually phoney and staged, particularly the standing-ovation happy ending. If Zwick intends this film to be a call to action, he's not going to get a response by implying that everything is hunky-dory.
The film's most gut wrenching moments are those portraying the violent training of young African boys, as ten year-olds are given guns, drugs, alcohol, and a brutally cold belief system. This would seem to be the film's real issue (the end credits even note that there are currently about 200,000 child soldiers in Africa), but Zwick's liberal guilt causes him to miss the truly serious current issues in the name of preaching about sins of the past. A disappointing film,
considering that this is coming from the man who gave us "Glory" and "The Last Samurai".
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Varese Sarabande VSD-6780 (2006)
Music composed by James Newton Howard. Conducted by Pete Anthony. Orchestrations by Bruce Babcock and Jon Kull. Special vocal performances by Alex Kharlamov. Recorded and mixed by Alan Myerson. Album produced by James Newton Howard.
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