Good - for Hollywood!

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2006)

This is classic Hollywood "dual-use" - tell a popular story to send a serious message. The idea is that you can use formula elements to get a huge audience who then learns uncomfortable things. You can tell the truth about the world and make enormous amounts of box office - no conflict there, right? The movie takes on big issues like child soldiers, diamond wars, failed states, kids with chopped-off hands, random slaughter of villagers, millions of refugees. It has excellent Hollywood production values - the action scenes dip you into terrifying violence and stir you around. The lead performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Djiman Hounsou are wonderful. DiCaprio's character, an ex-military diamond smuggler, is interesting and complex. But there are limits to dual-use strategy. The white hero has a love interest, an implausibly beautiful American journalist who tries to flirt her way into a scoop and then implausibly toughens up. In a Hollywood film individuals always have to be able to make a difference and not just save their own skin, so Solomon Vandy's search for his family is juxtaposed with the more ridiculous, self-flattering story of a journalist taking on the world-wide diamond trade. Finally, there's Hollywood's compulsory narcissism, which means that it can't explain why control of diamond fields requires rebel posses to massacre innocent villagers, or imagine African solutions to anything. There's a weird racism floating through all the sympathy for African victims, so that the rebel army scenes are shot Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style with gun-toting children dancing insanely around roaring fires in bloody compounds in an unwitting repeat of old Western stereotypes of bloodthirsty African savages. In Hollywood dual-use, structural problems are suppressed in favor of lone villains with a long reach, so that it is impossible to imagine, for example, that there may be a problem with capitalism itself, which has done so little good for so long for Africa. It all leads to a consumer boycott, the ultimate middle-class American political gesture - to not shop for one thing we want! It's true that Americans aren't interested in wearing "conflict diamonds" dug by one-handed African slave children. It's true that Hollywood does not exist in order to refute naive business books like "The World Is Flat." But putting a little more African thought and society in place of American journalists might have made the movie's hope for the future at least half as convincing as its blood-soaked action.