Excellent thriller but sanctimoniously self-righteous

Rating: 7/10 (30 January 2007)

Hands hacked off to prevent voting. Young children trained to machine gun villagers. Try to fight it or try to survive? Try to fight it by getting rich first?
Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Rhodesian-born diamond smuggler and ex-mercenary. He ferries ill-gotten gains from 1990s slave mines in Sierra Leone to fences in Liberia. The initial trade is diamonds for guns, but once in Liberia the stones have access to international markets. He meets Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) who has escaped from a slave mine after risking his life hiding an enormous pink diamond. Solomon's son, Dia, went to school every day and dreamed of becoming a doctor - until he was captured by the Revolutionary United Front and brainwashed into becoming a child soldier. For Solomon, recovering the diamond could save his family. For Danny, it could be a ticket out of the cycle of violence in which he has become a willing player.
Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is a journalist trying to expose the bloodshed and misery fuelled by diamonds. For her, Danny is a major potential story source. For Danny, she becomes a useful diplomatic player as they each try to use each other for their own agenda.
Blood Diamond is a taut thriller, but how legitimate is its claim to be a vehicle for human rights?
It made considerable furore. In the week of its British release, both The Economist and The New Statesman - leading influential newspapers - published related articles. DiCaprio was nominated for an Oscar. The US diamond industry announced it would donate $10,000 to African charities for each star raising a diamond-studded hand at the event - a gesture condemned by director Edward Zwick as distasteful.
The film is supported by Amnesty International and also by Global Witness - an organisation highlighting links between environmental exploitation and human rights abuses. Our average audience, in between popcorn and supersized CocaCola, is quite likely to take onboard the message that diamonds should be treated as a pariah like fur. Who wants to be responsible for tying the knot with a gem soaked in blood?
To be fair to the film, it goes to considerable lengths to point out that Sierra Leone is now at peace and that regulation of the industry covers all but a minute fraction of diamonds. This was due to a protocol called 'The Kimberley Process' which now regulates trade in rough diamonds. 99.8% of new diamonds are now from conflict-free sources. This doesn't mean that there are not still millions of dollars of blood money involved in the trade of a few diamonds. Or that slavery and child-militias have been wiped out. But the rhetoric of the movie is designed to make us angry rather than conveying precise information. It has a blockbuster style that spotlights the (excellent) performance of its star Leonardo DiCaprio and makes the villagers the supporting cast rather than the focus. Its target audience may enjoy a feeling of righteous moral outrage, but will they linger to absorb the factual information in the credits or on the official website? Will they ask sensible questions when buying diamonds (such as, "In which country were they mined?" "Were the stones traded under the auspices of the Kimberley Process?" "Can I see the guarantees"), or will they simply join the director in his tirade against any industry scapegoat, beneficent or not?
Acting and editing in Blood Diamond are superb. What could have been a very predictable film, keeps us on seat edge throughout its two-hours-plus running time. DiCaprio is amply rewarding the faith that early directors like James Cameron and Woody Allen expressed in him at a time when the public viewed him as just a pretty face. Djimon Hounsou contributes a towering performance. Only the beautiful Jennifer Connelly is woefully miscast. She is at her best in expressing the subtly ambiguous, restrained feelings she develops for DiCaprio's character, but her portrayal of a hardbitten reporter that goes it alone in Afghanistan and darkest Africa comes less easily.
Battles throughout are vicious and realistic. The film does an excellent job of documenting little known areas of human misery and also provides occasional momentary relief with the touching reunions or the re-educating of brainwashed children.
Although Blood Diamond raises worrying human rights issues, careful examination suggests there is more than a hint of jumping on a left-wing bandwagon by the film's producers. It covers important issues but audiences are best researching them independently and understanding both the good and the bad associated with the diamond trade. For instance, diamondfacts.org shows the diamond industry in a much better light than the global witness website, though both seem accurate and factual. Much of the human rights abuses over diamonds since 2003 relate to the abysmal conditions in which diamonds are mined; or the failure of some governments to use diamond wealth to benefit the communities concerned. Liberia is already under UN sanctions. Dealing in conflict diamonds is illegal in the UK. The film barely tackles India, one of the weakest links in the present chain. Worst of all, the unproductive misunderstanding over the industry's donation for 'Oscar waves' was down to the irony that, in Sierra Leone, raising of one's hand to vote used to be a signal for the Revolutionary United Front to chop off hands. One has to ask if the filmmakers' priorities are human rights or the financial success that can ride on the back of making a hullabaloo.
As a thriller, Blood Diamond has a cutting edge; as a protest film, it has as much subtlety as a machete while being careful about offending present day culprits. Finding a diamond story in present day Guinea rather than Sierra Leone might have been more to the point.