Last year, De Beers head Nicky Oppenheimer gave a rare interview to Newsweek, in which he expressed his fears for the future of the diamond market. This and other manoeuvres revealed how much De Beers (which dominates the world diamond trade) was spooked by the movie Blood Diamond, then still in production.
”Blood diamonds” is a more dramatic term for what are otherwise called ”conflict diamonds”, the gems mined by rebel movements in Africa and used to buy the arms necessary to prosecute their bloody struggles. It’s usually the most maverick movements (little more than bandits) who do this — though Robert Mugabe’s interests in sending troops to the Congo surely had something to do with heaps of lovely gems. In any case, in places such as Sierra Leone before the 1999 peace deal (where the movie is set), such rebels appear to have no political agenda beyond the seizure of power, or, failing that, as much carnage as possible.
Hence De Beers’s fear that a film detailing such activities would ”taint the industry’s reputation”, as Newsweek put it; that consumers would ”no longer [be able to] buy diamonds with an easy conscience”. This reaction shows how powerful movies are, especially ones with big stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio: De Beers did not react nearly so jumpily to Greg Campbell’s much more hard-hitting book, Blood Diamonds (which the movie fails to acknowledge).
De Beers need not have worried. The movie is not, after all, about life on a legitimate diamond mine, and how much exploitation and suffering that may involve. The makers of Blood Diamond have gone out of their way to show that the diamond industry has done its best to stem the flow of conflict diamonds: the movie opens with a bunch of white men in suits earnestly debating the issue, and closes with a snapshot of the Kimberley Process, which was set up by De Beers and others to ensure that the provenance of their diamonds was above board. It also has a solemn adjuration to consumers to make sure they know the diamonds they buy for their loved ones haven’t been washed in the blood of Africa.
Besides that, Blood Diamond offers diamond fans little to concern them other than the emotional conflicts of DiCaprio’s character, Danny Archer. He’s a Rhodesian-cum-South African ex-mercenary who operates out of Sierra Leone, selling arms to a notably nasty bunch of rebels in exchange for the diamonds they and their enslaved captives pan out of a local river. There is one especially big stone he wants to get his hands on, a stone found by captive Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who has managed to escape after hiding it in a hole in the ground.
A great deal of trouble is taken to establish Danny’s credentials as a bad guy, though it’s clear from the outset that this is a set-up. Who really imagines that a character played by as big a star as DiCaprio, heart-throb of millions and box-office gold, is going to stay a bad guy until the end? Besides, when an idealistic young American woman reporter (Jennifer Connelly) arrives to challenge his hard-bitten cynicism, and he makes a deal with the palpably good Solomon, all a viewer can think is: redemption ahoy!
Of course, that redemption takes the whole movie to evolve, which means the narrative suspense is akin to having your teeth filled: you know it’s going to be painful, but it’s inevitable, so you just have to sit there. In the meantime, though, you can listen carefully to DiCaprio’s Rhodesian/South African accent, which in fact he manages rather well, all things considered. He only sounds like an Australian brought up in the Outer Hebrides a few times, and he even has a priceless moment in which he mutters a choice piece of Afrikaans slang under his breath — which reduced the audience at the screening I attended to paroxysms. Without even trying to be amusing, it’s funnier than the complete works of Leon Schuster.
Blood Diamond comes flagged as ”from the director of The Last Samurai”, as though that were a recommendation. At least that puff warns us that this is another movie in which a white man finds his soul through his engagement with an exoticised ”other”, though those poor suffering Africans have less in the way of attractive outfits and spiritual disciplines to offer than the stately, suicidal Japanese of The Last Samurai.
In fact, all they have to offer is their suffering, so the spectacle of African pain becomes a picturesque (or, now and then, thrilling) backdrop to Danny’s redemption. Hounsou’s character is as one-dimensional as Connelly’s intrepid girl reporter; they are there as foils for DiCaprio’s Danny, who at least has two whole dimensions — bad and redeemed. The rest is simply grist for the mill of an emotionally facile thriller that purports to be about something serious but reverses the terms: the story of Danny is not there to inform us and make us feel bad about conflict diamonds; the conflict diamonds, and all the suffering they cause, are there to make us care about one good-looking white guy’s change of heart.
As a whole, Blood Diamond is the cinematic equivalent of American fighter jets bombing Somali civilians, with the only distinction that it also manages to be boring.