Blood Diamond

Posted by Matthew Alexander (matthew@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 18, 2006

It’s been three years since Edward Zwick brought us The Last Samurai, a film with an attractive premise and solid visuals which made for a great trailer. But the final product, though decent, was just not the thoroughly satisfactory fare that we had hoped for. In this respect, Zwick’s latest movie Blood Diamond is a repeat of his last opus.

Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) and Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) end up in the same prison in Africa. Solomon is erroneously taken for a rebel when a government militia raids the slave labor camp in which he has been forced to mine for diamonds, diamonds which are used to purchase weapons for rebel groups fighting a civil war. Archer, working further up in the same line, is apprehended when he tries to smuggle these diamonds across the border from Sierra Leone and into Liberia.

While Solomon and Danny are locked up, the boss of Solomon’s mining operation is brought in and, upon seeing Solomon, accuses him of having found and hidden an especially valuable diamond. Though Solomon denies it, Archer, who must appease the rebels whose treasure he lost to authorities, perks up and takes notice. When they get out of prison, Archer makes contact with Solomon and hatches a plan to travel back into the midst of the civil war to go after the diamond that Solomon did indeed find.

Not trusting him at first,throughout the movie Solomon struggles with his uncertainty of Archer’s true intentions, Solomon agrees to go help Archer find the diamond if Archer will help him locate the members of his family. An uneasy pact is formed and a journey begins.

The movie lives and dies on two ingredients: the characters of Archer, Solomon and Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a reporter who latches onto Archer and establishes a love-hate relationship with him, and the visceral thrills of their perilous trail to the blood diamond. Zwick and his team do a very solid job of filming, but it’s difficult to travel further than the script will go, and this one is lacking a full tank of gas.

Maddy and Archer have the most interesting relationship. Their ups and downs and ons and offs provide for the most absorbing drama that the film has to offer. There is an attraction there from the outset, but Maddy’s idealistic principles and Archer’s unscrupulous pragmatism, which obscures and suffocates any ethics he may have, guarantee a good amount of friction.

For all the difficulty that Maddy and Archer cause each other, Solomon and Archer go through much worse. Solomon’s character is hard to accept. He is at once na¯ve and childlike in his simplicity but yet astute enough to suspect Archer. He is a man who not only nearly refuses to pose as a cameraman when Archer asks him to, but seems not to even understand why anyone would request such deception of him nor to have ever considered that such deception could be possible. And yet, contrary to his forthright and innocent nature, he is perceptive enough to be wary of the diamond smuggler’s deal.

It’s a mix of traits that just don’t fit together well, and the saintly and simple Solomon’s portrayal smacks of liberal patronizing. That Africans suffer is beyond dispute, but that this suffering makes them saints and washes away the flaws and weaknesses which all humans have is too much to swallow. It’s not as if every black African in the film is so treated, but a more realistic character in Solomon Vandy’s place would have helped the film quite a bit.

Another help to the film would have been some sort of relationship between Maddy and Solomon, a relationship made up of more than a goodbye hug at the appropriate moment. This absence is a gaping hole which impedes any development of group dynamic among the three. Just as a character should have an arc of development, so too should a group of main characters as they meet, get to know one another and together deal with obstacles from without and within. But when two of the characters might as well be on separate continents for all the interaction they have, this sort of satisfying arc is not going to be realized.

The second ingredient contributes to the film in about the same mediocre fashion as the first. The action sequences seem predictable and obligatory rather than inventive and fresh. Yes, they get shot at. Yes, they sneak around a little. Sure, they use clever trickery to get out of some tight spots. But nothing kinetic occurs whose invention would require more than a couple moments of brainstorming by the writers given the location and premise of the script. Their action sequences are just too obvious; we need something new, something creative. Without this element, the film is just another unremarkable story put together by competent but not exceptional professionals.

One last bit of criticism pertains to the message in the film, a message made so blatant and explicit that one wonders if the movie itself was thrown together merely so that the message could be delivered. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with the message itself, but rather than spoon feed us the movie would have done better to allow us to come to our own conclusion, something we are going to do anyway no matter how obvious they make their points. If the story is tailored right we won’t need characters telling us how we should think about such and such situation by way of obvious dialogues. Just present the injustice and we’ll come to that conclusion ourselves.

If Edward Zwick is not a brilliant director, he certainly is a capable one. He has brought us some very fine movies before (The Siege, Courage Under Fire, Glory) and never seems to make a truly bad movie. His actors acquit themselves well and his photography is up to industry standards. But he needs to find more remarkable scripts and give himself a better starting point. Zwick is not a director like David Lynch whose use of light, sound and setting adds entirely new and unpredictable dimensions to scripts which might seem to offer far less. He is a standard movie maker with the talent to weave a tale well but not the unusual vision to see things which no one else can. A superb script, therefore, is a must if he is to make a superb movie. Blood Diamond boasts no such superb script, and therefore the movie is respectable, nothing more.

Read more articles by Matthew Alexander