>>REVIEW
BLOOD DIAMOND
STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou and Jennifer Connelly
DIRECTED BY: Edward Zwick
Opens Friday, December 8
Check listings
Within 10 minutes of the opening credits of Edward Zwick’s new film, Blood Diamond, you know you are in for a film experience unlike anything else so far this year. The film opens innocently enough. A boy wakes up late for school, his father hustles him down the road so he can catch a boat that will take him there. That’s about where the innocence ends. As rebels storm the Sierra Leone village, the screen explodes in violence – bullets rip through the village splattering blood on nearby walls, as careful editing leaves just enough to the imagination.
The film follows the story of two men. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is the aforementioned father. After being separated from his family, he is forced to work in the diamond mines as a slave to the country’s rebels. It’s here that he finds a rare pink diamond, which he buries. Along the way, he crosses paths with Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio). Archer is a diamond smuggler who happens to find out about Vandy’s buried treasure. With Vandy wanting his family and Archer wanting the diamond, the two men form a reluctant bond.
The majority of the movie is dedicated to building an unbearable tension between the two men that seems to come to a head at almost every turn. Zwick masterfully pulls the strings of the underlying racism that still exists between white and black Africans as they try to come to terms with having to trust each other. As they continue to stumble their way through their violent surroundings, the script deftly avoids the trappings of a buddy action movie.
Violence is the thread that holds this film together. Zwick crafts scenes of warfare far beyond anything you’d see in a traditional war film – scenes that are vivid enough to be terrifying, but still poignant. And while the story of the two men is at the forefront of the film, Zwick makes no bones about his underlying political agenda.
Blood Diamond, at its heart, is about the severe disparity between the amount of money that is spent on diamonds and the living conditions of the countries that produce them. Despite all of the war scenes, one of the most affecting moments finds Vandy in London, looking through a store window at a diamond necklace. This quick, 10 second scene effectively captures the sheer lack of humanity that Zwick sees in the trade of conflict diamonds. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.