For a Good Cause: Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, exposes the suffering that the illegal stones buys in Africa

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2007)

Blood Diamond is a fast-paced thriller and a vigorous entertainment. And it is also a movie with a declared mission: to instruct the audience of the suffering that the diamond reservations imposes or imposed to the African countries that possesses them. The called "conflit diamonds" are rough stones panned in regions dominated by guerrillas. Extracted almost always by slave work, they are delivered through subterfuges to the classifieds of London and Antuerpia, and them dispatched to the regular trading in all the world. They finance, at this moment, the killing spree at the Ivory Coast. At Serra Leoa, the chosen scenario by director Edward Zwick for Blood Diamond, the United Revolutionary Front (URF) used the illegal gems to pay for more then one decade of violence, between 1991 and 2002. Many countries in the continent live legitimately of their diamonds - as Angola and Serra Leoa really, since they left civil war. But, where they fall on the hands of guerrillas, the stones buy by loads the typical disgraces of the continent: violence, hunger, corruption and the expulsion of entire populations from the coveted zones.
It would be even possible to suspect opportunism here, since movies such as Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener and even this same Blood Diamond make of Africa the cause of the moment for Hollywood. But Zwick's thriller conjugates what is best in this formula of entertainment with conscience. Leonardo DiCaprio, in another excellent performance, is Danny Archer, citizen of Zimbabue (that he calls for the colonial name of Rodesia), ex-soldier of the south African elite and actual weapons dealer for guerrilla fighters - a professional option nothing of uncommon for white africans with his qualifications. It is 1999, year which the civil war in Serra Leoa accomplished a state of paroxysm, and it isn't fiction the mere joke portrayed on the film, in which the guerrilla fighters puts entire villagers in line and, with machete on hand, makes them extend their arms and ask if they prefer "short sleeve" or "long sleeve". By chance, the road of Danny will cross with one of these civilians: Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounson), fisherman that lost a son to the guerrilla and was directed to a gold panning. Solomon finds, and hides, a fabulous pink diamond. But the rumors about the stone starts to spread, attracting the attention of Danny and Maddy (Jennifer Connely), a journalist that sees on the mercenary a chance for a story about the complicity of the diamond industry with the illegal mining. Danny, Solomon and Maddy are figures that have much more in common with the world of celluloid - but, thanks to a competent script, they act as if they were on the real world, using one another to accomplish their diversed goals.
With this marriage of adventure, drama and, off course, romance, Edward Zwick makes a movie far superior to The Last Samurai and The Siege. There is no action missing in Blood Diamond. And there is no missing as well clarity in the manner which the film brushes the crudity of life in a volatile Africa, with its guerrilla boys, the white soldiers without legitimate function, the peregrination over the refugee camps, the devastation of the city and field. Signs that Blood Diamond touches on a sensible area is that the diamond industry crafted a campaign of public relations to boast the efficiency of the called Kimberley Process - system that obligates the signed governments to detail the trajectory of every stone, since the pan of origin. Even Nelson Mandela, the uncontested moral authority of Africa, manifested preoccupation about the effects of the movie. An indiscriminate boycotting to the diamonds of the country, he defended, would ruin the economies that has in the legitimate extraction their largest source of income, such as South Africa, Botsuana and Namibia. According to the industry, since 2003 the Kimberly Process reduced from 4% total to 1% the circulation of "conflict diamonds". In a market of 60 billions dollars, which means that, for each year, there is still left 600 million dollars to buy violence with in Africa. It is for these that, very appropriately, Blood Diamond intends to call attention for.