In the hands of a lesser director ""Blood Diamond"" could have turned into a bloated, uneven, sprawling mess. But Edward Zwick, director of ""Glory"" and ""The Last Samurai,"" deftly weaves together the film's political messages with the more conventional Hollywood anti-hero story arc with powerful results.
The film is set in the war-ravaged Sierra Leone of the late 1990s, where ""freedom-fighting"" rebel forces storm into village after village, executing women, sending the stronger men to slave work camps and ""recruiting"" 12-year-old boys to join the revolution. During these horrific sequences Zwick's camera does not pan away to avoid the violence but instead lingers on the brutality—a startling process that does not desensitize the audience the way it would with typical action fare. In fact, as the toll of murders mounts, the audience is allowed to synch up with the emotional arcs of the two lead characters (Djimon Hounsou and Leonardo DiCaprio), eventually exploding in the film's final act. The plot of the film is centered on the search for a magnificent, flawless diamond, which serves as the link between all the characters in the film.
Reminiscent of ""Casablanca,"" each character in the film sees the diamond as their ticket out of Africa to start a better life elsewhere. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers another tremendous performance as conflicted diamond smuggler Danny Archer—a mainstay character of traditional war films, but performed with enough grit and nuance to elevate the entire movie. DiCaprio again dons the scruffy goatee and squinty ""crow's feet"" expression successfully employed in ""The Departed,"" in what may be the crucial performance that completes his transformation away from his teen-heartthrob past and into more masculine terrain. Hounsou, playing a humble fisherman whose son is captured by the ruthless rebel army, summons all of his power and magnetic star presence from past performances (""Amistad"" and ""Gladiator""), fleshing out an under-written role, while providing the realistic African perspective crucial to the film's message.
The love story between DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly is the one major action film prerequisite that does not survive the marriage to the political thriller genre. From their chance encounter at a bar through the final sequence of the film, little, if anything, about their relationship is believable. ""Blood Diamond"" covers so much genuine-feeling territory that the manufactured paint-by-numbers love story seems synthetic by comparison.
The approach DiCaprio brings to his character is precisely what does not resonate with Connelly's. Having served in the army against South Africa during the time of apartheid, DiCaprio is not compelled to pity the black citizens in the film, but instead empathizes with them from the perspective of a fellow human being.
Connelly, playing an American journalist, exemplifies the liberal, white perspective of many Americans that ultimately see third-world nations in terms of charity and guilt. While well-intentioned and earnest, her character seems to be written in order to humanize the United States, which takes a beating at the hands of the film's message about conflict diamonds and our capitalist culture. However, it is DiCaprio's performance that challenges the audience to wrestle with the issues beyond knee-jerk sympathy, eliciting the visceral reactions necessary to enact true progress and change.
