A Diamond is [Guilt] Forever

by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith / January 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

From the time of Belgium’s King Leopold II’s atrocities wreaked on the peoples of the Congo in the 1880s to the present, Africa’s populations have been exploited for their bountiful resources. Director Ed Zwick’s film “Blood Diamond,” set in 1999 in Sierra Leone, illustrates the workings of the illegal diamond trade.

An early scene shows armed members of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), in pickup trucks careening through a village, demanding food, money, and valuables. Those who try to escape or refuse to comply are shot.

Djimon Hounsou, the stoic, imposing actor who seems to reprise the same heroic character in every film he’s in, plays Solomon Vandy, a fisherman. During the rebel sweep, he manages to hide his wife, youngest boy, and an infant daughter, but his oldest son is captured. Vandy is also snagged and hauled away to work in the diamond fields. The diamonds are subsequently sold on the black market to provide arms for the RUF.

We see Vandy’s kidnapped son later in truly shocking, eye-opening scenes of the RUF plying him with drugs and indoctrinating him as one of the thousands of “child soldiers” trained to shoot at anything, even their parents, for the rebels’ “cause.” Brief articles about this practice have appeared in the press, though few in Europe or America have ever raised an outcry.

Zwick includes a scene of fat-cats (one of them Asian) sitting around a conference table at a G8 Summit in Denmark discussing the problem of conflict, or “blood” diamonds. Their main concern is that should too many end up on the black market, the price of legally traded diamonds would drop. At the same time, they hope to protect themselves from any bad publicity derived from the fact that they could have blood on their hands.

The film takes off when Vandy finds a rare, pink diamond about the size of a small rock. He manages to bury it before he is rounded up and sent to prison in a raid by government soldiers.

A goateed Di Caprio shows up in town as Danny Archer, a dealer in guns and black-market diamonds. Archer is caught trying to smuggle diamonds and is tossed into the same prison as Vandy. When they are freed, he tells Vandy that if he helps him retrieve and sell his diamond, he’ll see that his son is found and his family reunited. But you sense his motives are not honorable.

Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connolly), an investigative journalist, has come to Sierra Leone to do an exposé on the illegal diamond trade and meets Danny, who now passes himself off as a reporter for National Geographic. Their repartée is playful on top of the fatalistic cant of free-wheeling adventurers in life-threatening situations. Archer refers to the place he’s from as Rhodesia; “Zimbabwe,” Maddy corrects him. Eventually, because of her, he gains a conscience.

Archer and Vandy make it to a refugee camp where Vandy hopes to find his family. An aerial shot shows two or three supply containers set in the midst of a million swarming people corralled behind a cyclone fence. “You’ll see a few seconds of this on CNN between sports and weather,” Maddy ruefully observes.

The scene shows how puny are the attempts of NGOs to provide help for countless stricken peoples, who wouldn’t be in this mess were it not for ongoing incursions into their lands by the U.S. and Europe.

Maddy does not accompany Archer and Vandy when they take off after his diamond, though she wants to. I breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t pop up behind them on the trail, thus sparing us scenes of Maddy falling into a pit of writhing snakes, screaming her head off, and Danny risking his life to save her.

Once they are on their long trek to safety, Zwick’s film takes a decided pattern. Whenever the action pauses to give Vandy and Archer (and us) a needed rest after enduring harrowing escapes from pursuers, cinematographer Eduardo Serra pans over breathtaking, paradisiacal landscapes beneath painterly skies.

This is a clue that all hell’s about to break loose. Predictably, there are explosions and screaming people fleeing for their lives; or more of Vandy’s and Archer’s close calls.

Despite tragedy befalling the lovers, the film wraps up too tidily, even to a final scene of Hounsou, dressed in a conservative business suit like a member of the G8, carrying a briefcase stuffed with American money.

It’s not surprising that the huge diamond conglomerate DeBeers bad-mouthed the film in an attempt to dissuade theatergoers. Before the final credits appear, there are a few lines stating that all retail diamonds bear a certificate from Kimberly Mines attesting to their legality. Still . . .