Rough Stones

Blood Diamond is a powerful, and troubling, example of the Hollywood political thriller.

by Michael Atkinson

Here we are again, in the Hollywoodland that looks in the mirror and sees whole-grain liberal goodness, where hot-topic crises in the Third World are plumbed for their dramatic juice, but only when there's a gorgeous white movie star to root for amid the crowds of darker sufferers. Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond is an ambiguous, troublesome example, because it's wise about the short cuts and Beverly Hills baloney, it's very carefully written, and it's a thundering, unflinchingly brutal, eagle-eyed ordeal to be respected.

True, we've got linen-white Leonardo DiCaprio to keep our middle-class, latent racist sympathies in check while we muck around in the savage politics of 1999-2000 Sierra Leone, but Charles Leavitt's screenplay complicates things considerably. DiCaprio's studly man of action is not only a merry crook, an arms trafficker and diamond smuggler happily complicit in the war's civilian slaughter, but he's also a proud white Zimbabwean (or, as he puts it, Rhodesian), an experienced mercenary, a veteran bush hunter with a taste for blood, and a fearless outlaw businessman with fond memories of apartheid. Not even James Woods' supremely weaselly journalist in Oliver Stone's Salvador had this much politically incorrect baggage, and no white-man-in-Africa scenario was ever this craftily arranged, or as logically involved with real socioeconomics.

The period depicted here is the tail end of this tiny, gem-rich African nation's decade-long civil war, when the blood-crazed, limb-hacking rebel forces (the R.U.F.) make a decisive push into Freetown and seize huge portions of the city, mowing down civilians by the thousands. It's all about diamonds. Zwick is exhaustive — think Syriana — in outlining the diamond trade as it accumulates bodies in West Africa. He portrays the business as being fueled by American consumers, greased by hired mercenary armies (led by Arnold Vosloo's Afrikaaner colonel), and controlled by one corporation (here, monopolist De Beers is renamed Van de Kaap).

STONED AND DETHRONED: Leonardo DiCaprio's amoral diamond smuggler and Djimon Hounsou's dispossessed fisherman.

The first domino is Djimon Hounsou, as tribal fisherman Solomon Vandy, whose village is laid waste by the R.U.F. and who is abducted with his young son. (The slaughter sequences in Zwick's movie, jittery with post-production shakes, are nonetheless clear, loud and unrelenting; no Hollywood movie has been as matter-of-fact about executed and mutilated children.) The boy is indoctrinated as a child soldier while Vandy is sent to a rebel mining camp, where, standing in a stream, he happens to pull an egg-sized pink diamond that is later appraised at somewhere around 100 carats. He secrets it away and buries it in the bush, which is the elusive spot everyone we meet — DiCaprio's fortune hunter, Jennifer Connelly's magazine journalist, Vosloo's army, a vicious R.U.F. commander (David Harewood) — will spend the rest of the film trying to get back to, come hell or high water.

So, provided with a propulsive throughline, Blood Diamond is tremendously effective as pulp. Politically, it's a messier game; all efforts are made to respect the real victims and blame the real perps. Zwick even keeps to a minimum the scared-white-boy exoticism that dimmed the light of Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener. (Is it post-colonialist guilt to be awed by the degree of butchery and the scale of poverty in modern Africa, or is it the proper response regardless of your national situation?) But as in Glory, Courage Under Fire and The Last Samurai, Zwick's woo-hoo love for military mayhem gets him in trouble, mixing simplistic notions of warrior nobility with questions of political morality. In Blood Diamond, the heroic pursuit of the gem — carried out by DiCaprio's slowly humanized lout and by Hounsou's righteous innocent — is managed by way of deliberately instigated warfare. Thousands die, it seems, including child soldiers and mining slaves, so the protagonists can have a chance at narrative completion. Talk about complicity — were we not supposed to notice?

Executed with spry intelligence when it isn't merely fulfilling the occasional dumb-blockbuster reflex, Blood Diamond nevertheless gains most of its weight from DiCaprio, who has long seemed more about gesture than personality, but who comes across for the first time here as a full-grown man, with a man's voice (his African accent is beautifully spiked by perfect colonial diction: "Quietly now..." he says in a tense moment, not merely "Shhh"), experience (sweet handling of the country's Krio argot), physical decisiveness and center of gravity. DiCaprio finally does what movie stars are supposed to do: enable us to swallow, in two hours, a grand river of drama and history and do it by the sheer convincing force of his presence.

(m_atkinson@citypaper.net)

Blood Diamond

Directed by Edward ZwickA Warner Bros releaseOpens Friday at area theaters