Blood Diamond (2006)

Blood Diamond (2006)

by

Santiago Pliego

“Sometimes I wonder, will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? Then I look around and I realize, God left this place a long time ago.”

This review contains spoilers

In the darkness of a straw hut, a match is struck. A fisherman bends of over his son and gently puts his hand on his head to wake him up to go to school. The boy, with a croaky voice, complains and says that English boys do not go to school every day. “Every day,” the father responds, “Just like you. So you can become a doctor, not mend the nets like your father.” On the way to school, the fisherman and his son joke and play. They walk alone on a sandy road that shines in vibrancy with the light of the sun. A cool wind brushes their faces and flaps the fisherman’s unbuttoned shirt around like a flag. The stillness and relaxed ambience is suddenly tortured by the sound of approaching trucks and hip-hop music. When the fisherman turns and faces the direction of the sound, he is terrified; trucks loaded with jeering rebels wielding AK-47s and machetes are blazing through the side road and the fisherman realizes with horror that they are headed towards the village, where his wife and daughters are still inside the hut. He pulls his son to his side and they race towards the village, in an effort to save their family. Out of breath, they reach the edge of the village, where the rebels are already shooting without distinction anything that moves. Most of the rebels are no older than 12 years old. The fisherman frantically reaches for his machete and cuts a hole in the side of his hut, amid the cries of his family and the shots of the rebels, in order to take his family away. He manages to squeeze them through the gap, but as they run away, three rebels spring from the side and tackle the fisherman. “Go!” he screams to his terrified family, as he tries to struggle with the three rebels, to no avail. As he is captured, the last thing he hears is his son, screaming, “Papa!” This is Sierra Leone, 1993.

So begins the film Blood Diamond, directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Defiance), which tells the story of a fisherman, Solomon Vandi (Djimon Hounsou), a Rhodesian diamond smuggler, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), and an American reporter, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connely). When Solomon is captured after a rebel attack on his village, he is sent to the diamond camps to mine diamonds in order to finance the rebels’ war against the government. While he is there, he finds a pink diamond the size of a birds’ egg and hides it from the commander of the labor camp. After an attack on the mines by government forces, he is confused for a rebel and sent to prison alongside the commander, who demands to know where he hid the diamond. Danny Archer, a recently-arrested diamond smuggler/ex-military, happens to be in the prison, and when he hears about the diamond, uses his military connections to release him and Solomon from prison, because he wants Solomon to lead him to the diamond. At the same time, Archer is being pursued by a Maddy Bowen, a reporter who wants to uncover the atrocities behind the diamond industry. She has published many articles before, but in order to accomplish something, she needs dates, names, and account numbers, and Archer has all that information about his buyers. The stories of these three characters are thus intertwined and they embark in a quest to find the diamond.

This film is extremely powerful. The cinematography and the music are excellent; both convey potent emotional undertones to the audience through their use of contrasts. Light and shadow are present in many different scenes, many times natural (day & night footage) and other times synthetic (the prison scene). The music as well changes drastically from one scene to another or even from one minute to the next, as is the case in scenes like the opening one. The sudden changes are not comfortable, but this Sierra Leone is far from being the perfect destination for summer vacations, and the music helps to display this. The editing is also very well executed; by intercalating scenes of brutality from the rebels’ part with scenes from ordinary life in Europe, the film argues that many times we are simply unaware of the suffering and destruction in other countries. The constant use of this style of editing goes along with the contrast motif presented in the cinematography and in the music. What stands out in the movie, though, is the acting. DiCaprio provides us with a mature, well-rounded performance that in many ways (alongside other films like The Departed, Body of Lies, and the Aviator) mark the era of more competent and intense DiCaprio. Connelly’s performance is quite good, but is definitely the weakest of the three main character’s portrayals. Hounsou’s performance, however, is the best in the whole film, and arguably one of the best I have ever seen in terms of an emotional, three-dimensional role. His ability to show emotions through his facial expressions is extraordinary, and coped with his voice and his movement in the frame, we get a frighteningly realistic character that is agonizing over his lost family. In terms of aesthetics and their use to convey a message, this film is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

Alongside the performances and the characters comes the portrayal and embodiment of the different moral themes in the story through the characters’ narrative. The film’s worldview is biblical, yet it is not deemed as such in the film’s context. Nevertheless, the characters’ stories are compatible with the Christian worldview. Danny Archer is a self-centered and arrogant man who, due to his success as a soldier in Sierra Leone’s shattered army, is partnered with Colonel Coetzee and splits the profits of the diamond’s sales in return for protection. He is surrounded by men who consider the military a “company” that is in Sierra Leone only to make money by selling and rationing natural resources and conflict stones. Archer tells Solomon that he will help him find his family if Solomon leads him to where he buried the diamond, but in reality, Archer is planning to steal the diamond once Solomon shows him where it is. He thinks that killing is the way of life in Sierra Leone and is happy with how that helps his business. In other words, Archer is a man who stays with what he wants, even he needs to die in order to get it. Maddy Bowen is a die-hard journalist who wants to help people yet is incapable of doing so without factual proof. She plays the role of the referee between Archer and Solomon, but she is not a perfect mediator, because she does not understand each man’s backstory. The film is careful in crafting the character in such a way that Maddie Bowen herself, regardless of her American background, stereotypes the people in the Sierra Leone conflict. Only when she is involved with Solomon and Danny in an extremely close relationship is she able to discern the motivations that fuel each man’s actions. Solomon’s story is the overarching story, since it brings everyone together. It serves not only as a canopy for the other characters’ narrative but also presents the most explicit biblical theme. At one point in the film, Solomon discovers that shortly after his own capture, his son was taken by the rebels. Now, when a kid is kidnapped by the rebels, he is indoctrinated, taught to kill, drugged, and turned into a soulless fanatic. At the beginning of his capture, Solomon’s son does not like to be with the rebels. Yet, a few scenes later, we see him getting drugged while other boys around him smoke and have a great time. Solomon’s son accepts the new lifestyle and forgets about his family. Solomon has already found his wife and daughters, but when he learns that his son is gone (and realizing where he is) he is devastated, and thus the search for the diamond for him becomes the search for his son. At one point, Archer pulls a gun on Solomon when the latter wants to infiltrate the rebel camp to look for his son. Archer is afraid that Solomon will blow their operation to recover the diamond and doesn’t understand the love of a family. Solomon confronts the armed Archer and says, “He is my son. I am his father. I must go find him. Go ahead, shoot me if you want, but I will go find him.” In a sense, Solomon’s story is similar to Taken’s theme about a father that loves his children so much that he won’t let them go astray, and when they do, he goes and drags them from their sin back into the light. When Solomon finds his son, his son is so indoctrinated that he aims gun at him. In one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of the whole movie, Solomon reminds his son of what he was before he was taken by the rebels. With tears in his eyes, Solomon says, “I am your father who loves you. And you will come home with me to be my son, again.” The story also draws from the parable of The Prodigal Son, about a son who becomes a son “again” after the bad things that he has done. After Solomon and his son are reunited, they run with Archer towards a landing strip where a small airplane is going to pick them of and take them to safety, away from the mercenaries who are trying to take the diamond from them. Archer is shot and, due to his witnessing of Solomon’s confrontation with his son, he changes from the man who would rather die with the diamond in his hand than live while someone else enjoys the profit to the man who understands his futile life.  Archer has just been betrayed by Colonel Coetzee, he is dying, and he has 2, 000 British pounds in his pocket in the form of a stone. He realizes that, if he continues in his greed, Solomon, his son, and he will die. Therefore, he gives the diamond to Solomon and his son and allows them to escape while he holds of the mercenaries and says goodbye to Maddy on a SatPhone. Eventually, Solomon and Maddy meet in London and unravel the illegal diamond trade of a renowned diamond company for whom Archer worked, thanks to some notes with factual proof that Archer gave to Maddy before.

The film does not acknowledge the sinful nature of man, and thus the narrative is slightly away from presenting a complete Christian worldview. At some point, a schoolmaster who has a secret home for ex-rebel children, says that people are just people. “It is what they do that makes them good or bad. A moment of love, even in a bad man, can give meaning to a life. None of us knows whose path will lead us to God.” This, of course, is not true. Even one sin is enough to send a man to hell. Yet, even with this claims, the film still presents a great argument about how men, no matter how sinful they might be, can be redeemed and about how God will drag those whom he calls away from sin, even if they don’t want to. Also, through Maddy Bowen, the film provides a criticism of the illegal diamond trade that still happens in the African continent.

Gritty, gruesome, brutal, and cold. That’s is how this film presents reality in many of its scenes. Yet, that is also how an unredeemed sinner’s heart is. In order to present a powerful redemption, there has to be something hellishly bad to be redeemed from, yet this film does not stop in the shocking or violent but provides an equally shocking narrative of redemption that is true in most of its elements.