Click Here For Our Interview with Leonardo DiCaprio
Click Here For Our Interview with Jennifer Connelly
Click Here For Our Interview with Djimon Hounsou

Blood Diamond

Review By: Staff

Blood Diamond is a study of inconsistency, a choice of words that almost unfailingly denotes negativity; yet in Edward Zwick’s (Glory, The Last Samurai) new film I find myself being inconsistent even in the wordings imputation. For as much as I feel that his film Blood Diamond is inconsistent in its cinematic “verite”, I cannot help but feel that it simultaneously works to break the adhesion that Hollywood has on conventional genre films. An explanation will follow.

Zimbabwean Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator, The Departed), an ex-mercenary and current diamond smuggler learns of a Mende man’s hidden fortune while locked in prison. This man, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, Amistad, In America) has been taken from his family and has been forced to work in the diamond fields. While in the fields he comes upon a precious gem, which he in turn hides in order to use it later to barter his family, especially his son Dia (Caruso Kuypers) who has been recruited as a child soldier.

Archer knows an opportunity when it presents itself and he sets out to convince Vandy (with inadvertent help from some rogue warring militia groups) that they have been forced to help one another so that both can get what they desire. Meanwhile, Maddie Bowen (Jennifer Connolly, A Beautiful Mind, Little Children) is in Sierra Leone in order to expose the complicit diamond industry to the seemingly uncaring first and second world. She becomes involved in the storied relationship between Archer and Vandy and looks to expose Archer (or at least the type of man she assumes that he is) as a smuggler and as an essential part of the blood diamond triangle.

Maddie’s undertaking to both expose and glean Archer for information is an intriguing concept. Maddie, like us (the audience) must turn a skeptical eye toward Archer, for his character is layered with uncertainty. From her perspective and also our own there is inconsistency between his actions and what he shares through their discourse.

Is Archer so unbearably self-involved that he is truly uncaring towards the people he is affecting? Does the loss of his parents when he was a young boy warrant his dearth of social justice awareness? Or does he in fact care about the plight of Vandy and his family, and is he sacrificing not only for himself but for the lives of another? These questions are important to the character of Archer, and DiCaprio gives a layered performance; but do any of these contradictory questions relate to any of the ancillary characters in the film?

Vandy, with a powerful performance by Hounsou is the definition of the film reviewer’s favorite musical analogy of “one note.” His character is clear - he is a good man, who only wants to love his family, and when things go awry he becomes a ...