Rick and I watched the movie Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It came out in 2006. Since we both read The Last Resort, which talks about the illegal diamond market in Zimbabwe, Rick has become fascinated with the diamond industry. He's reading a non-fiction book on it right now. In The Last Resort, one of the black market diamond dealers talks about how inaccurate the movie Blood Diamond is, and how he wants to write his own movie about the whole thing. Anyway, somehow Rick recorded the movie, so we watched it the other night.
First of all, there is a ton of brutal, brutal violence in it that to me was just unwatchable. It is like watching a movie about the holocaust or something. Some things are just too dreadful. Gangs of thugs pulling into villages and randomly slaughtering all the fleeing women and children or capturing them and then cutting off their hands, is just too evil to bear. So we fast-forwarded through a lot of those scenes because I couldn't watch them at all. So very wicked and distressing. God help us!
The main character, DiCaprio, I can't remember his name in the movie, is a white Zimbabwean whose parents were apparently killed in the civil war and who seems to have been taken under the wing of a 'general' who is corrupt and both buys black market diamonds from warring states like Sierra Leone while at the same time attacking them with his army. I am not sure of the politics of this at all. How did a South African general get involved in another country's civil war? Maybe they gave military aid? I don't know the situation. Anyway, DiCaprio is a corrupt smuggler out for money and completely inured against the brutality all around him. In fact, he's part of the brutality. He, however, finds out about a huge pink diamond stone found by an enslaved diamond worker, whose family has been displaced by an attack on their village. He doesn't know where his wife and children are. This man, Solomon, winds up in the same jail as DiCaprio. DiCaprio has connections so he gets out of jail and then works it so Solomon can get out. He's trying to get Solomon to tell him where he hid the pink diamond. Solomon isn't saying. He is obsessed with finding his family and he is almost crazed by it. So DiCaprio brokers a deal, he'll work it so that Solomon can find his family if Solomon gives him the diamond. Into this mix, is a pretty, cliched American reporter played by some beautiful actress whose hair never gets dirty, even as they travel from village to countryside to city trying to help Solomon. She's got higher aspirations than DiCaprio. She wants the truth about the Blood Diamond trade and she cares about the people who are suffering so horribly.
All this has a humanizing effect on DiCaprio's character. In the end DiCaprio gives his life to help Solomon get his son back (the son it turns out has been kidnapped by the rebels and trained to kill). I have only seen a couple other movies with DiCaprio, Catch Me If You Can, in which I thought he was just brilliant and The Aviator which honestly I didn't care for so much because I found all the characters so unsympathetic and basically not that interesting. Anyway, I didn't find DiCaprio all that convincing. I found his attempt at a Zimbabwe accent uneven. The movie had its silly trite Hollywood romance element in it too between him and the reporter. I find all the flirtation very effected. Do real people ever talk to each other that way? In spite of the artificiality, the reporter does say something that is meaningful. When DiCaprio goes to her to get help for Solomon, she sees through him that he actually is just using Solomon to get the diamond and she doesn't want to play along. She says something, like why should I help this one person when there are millions who need help? Then realizes what she's said.
I had Ronald Colman on the brain I think, because watching the scene where DiCaprio's character is alone on a hillside in Sierra Leone waiting to either die from his wounds or get shot by one of the surrounding soldiers combing the countryside, he has an epiphany about the meaning of his life. I half expected him to start orating: Tis a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done . . . .
But the movie does have a Christian ending. Even though DiCaprio has been a lost black sheep all his life and done many evil things, at the end he shows the greatest love by laying down his life for his friend.
The movie had other themes going too, about fatherhood. DiCaprio's father died young and the father figure in his life is the general who is corrupt and who has corrupted him. Then we see the young village boys being taken by the rebel armies and made to shoot their own parents and then brainwashed by the soldier to do their bidding. Again, corrupt fatherhood. But Solomon's whole reason for living is to be a good father and husband. He can't rest until he finds and rescues his son. We also meet another man who takes in children who've been maimed and programmed to kill, and he tries to give them love and security and heal them. He has dedicated his life to being a good father figure to the children. Ironically he gets shot by a boy soldier, but almost miraculously he survives.
This movie has many 4 letter words. It is especially fond of the one beginning with 'f.'
The guy who played Solomon was just terrific. Apparently he won best supporting actor for the movie.
So. in conclusion, it is a very violent, disturbing and flawed movie, but it does try to make a moral point and that part came across pretty well.
