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Rough in the Diamonds
By bukkhead | July 6, 2007
FILM REVIEW: ‘BLOOD DIAMOND’
Written by Charles Leavitt
Directed by Edward Zwick
Rated R
143 mins.
3½ stars
I haven’t seen Apocalypse Now, so it might be a bit silly to compare Blood Diamond to Coppola’s Vietnam-War Epic. But Apocalypse was such a huge movie, it is undeniably part of our pop-consciousness, and I have seen enough clips and heard enough anecdotes from the film to know what was going on. More or less. Maybe it’s a good thing I haven’t seen it, in this case of comparing it to Blood, since you will be able to understand what I’m talking about without having seen it yourself.
Mostly I am referring to all the big explosions and fighting scenes. Often in a film these are gratuitous or sensationalistic, but in a war movie, they kinda have to be there. Coppola didn’t glorify the war as much as use it to terrify. Want to know why a bunch of flower-lovin’ drug tokin’ vegans turned to activism, political awareness, and a general sense of outrage? Apocalypse itself didn’t change people; it was the war, and Apocalypse didn’t chronicle the change; it just chronicled the reason. Coppola showed us the grisly side of “over there.”
Gen X doesn’t have a draft to worry about, and we’re not as much into free love as we into conspicuous consumption. Blood Diamond gives us a different “over there,” one that (I hope) gives my fellow Gen Xers a reason to go learn more.
In a nutshell: the diamond industry thrives off of African wars; people kill each other every day so that diamond merchants can horde diamonds and create artificial scarcity. Leonardo DiCaprio is Danny Archer, a white Rhodesian, ex-boy-soldier of fortune, and diamond smuggler; Djimon Hounsou is Solomon Vandy, Sierra Leone peasant fisherman and father of three; Jennifer Connoly is Maddy Bowen, hard-core journalist and token hottie.
Make no mistake—this is Hollywood glitz, with all the regular props of a big-budget film. The plot is pretty straight forward: Solomon’s village is attacked by rebels, he is pressed into slavery, finds an ultra-rare pink diamond, escapes amid the chaos, and gets stuck with Danny who wants the diamond for himself. Director Edward Zwick doesn’t want to distract us from the message with confusing story lines, complex characters, or nuanced morals. Get it? Danny is you, the white folk who nevertheless are affecting and effected by Africa. Maddy is the conscious that nags at you to stop paying for children to be killed. And Solomon is the beautiful black man who suffers for your pretty little rocks.
Apocalypse made it clear to boomers: this isn’t your father’s war. Lotsa guts, but no more glory. Blood, I feel, says much the same. This is a call to Gen X: you’ve made your dot com dollars, you’ve been buying diamonds, and now it’s time to stop. It might be too late for you, but for your kids, your little brother on the verge of his own Gen Y real-estate bubble money, there needs to be a paradigm shift. Don’t buy diamonds. People have died for them.
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