Blood Diamond(I am glad to know that the diamond in my ring was ethically mined in Canada!)
Not a great review in the NY Times...
The makers of “Blood Diamond,” an exceptionally foolish thriller starring a most excellent
Leonardo DiCaprio, want you to know there may be blood on your hands, specifically your wedding finger. The story involves so-called conflict diamonds, illicitly mined stones that have been used to finance some of the most vicious wars in Africa. If films were judged solely by their good intentions, this one would be best in show. Instead, gilded in money and dripping with sanctimony, confused and mindlessly contradictory, the film is a textbook example of how easily commercialism can trump do-goodism, particularly in Hollywood.
Mr. DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a Rhodesian-born diamond smuggler who, having been orphaned during his native country’s violent struggles in the 1970s, has spent most of his 30-some years crisscrossing the continent as a soldier of fortune and a merchant of misery. Tousled and tanned, with a long, slicing gait and a killer smile, Danny looks as if he were born for trouble of the sweetest kind. But Mr. DiCaprio, perhaps because he knows that much of the audience has already crawled into his pocket, plays the smuggler as the scum he is. Even as the film coaxes Danny toward redemption, the actor fights to hold his ground and the truth of a character who has inspired the most fully sustained performance of his adult life.
This being an Edward Zwick film, it’s no surprise that redemption is on the menu. Mr. Zwick likes to make epic-size movies about men of anguish and conscience who, whether they wear Civil War blue (“Glory”) or a Meiji kimono (“The Last Samurai”), invariably land on the side of the angels. Danny is initially on the side of the devils, and when we first meet him in 1999 he is trying to cross the border of a perilously unstable Sierra Leone with a stash of diamonds tucked into some goats. Busted by a patrol from Sierra Leone, he lands in jail, where he soon hears of a precious pink diamond unearthed by a fisherman turned unwilling miner, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou).
The chase is on, and on. Written by Charles Leavitt, “Blood Diamond” more or less plays like an exotically situated action flick as each man races toward his respective goal. Solomon hopes to reunite with his wife and three children, from whom he has been violently separated; Danny just wants a score big enough to pay his way permanently out of Africa. Theirs might be a match made in movie-genre heaven if the filmmakers didn’t insist on wagging their fingers in our faces and delivering dire statistics by the ream, the intimations of Antwerp intrigue and an American journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), whose preferred interview method involves shimmying up to her subject like a pole dancer.
If the sociopolitical context weren’t so appalling, this ludicrous characterization and Ms. Connelly’s equally woeful performance would be easy to laugh off. But both are insulting because they transpire against a backdrop of human suffering, suffering that Maddy sternly lectures Danny for exploiting even as she snaps another photograph of the very same. (Say what!?) Any question that the filmmakers might be clued into Maddy’s cluelessness, might be directly engaging the contradictions involved whenever misery becomes fodder for entertainment, is answered by the documentarylike images of children roaming a mound of garbage, by the blank-looking men and women sitting in trash-strewn streets and by the periodically brandished arm and leg stumps. The horror, the horror.
Like “The Constant Gardener,” this film betrays an almost quasi-touristic fascination with images of black Africans, who function principally as colorful scenery or, as in the gruesome scenes inside rebel training camps, manifestations of pure evil. Pure evil that, incidentally, likes to listen to rap and, in one case, wears a Snoop Dogg T-shirt along with his gat. Good as gold, Solomon earns a sizable share of screen time, and though the performance is expectedly sympathetic, the character has none of Danny’s complexity, which means that he’s inherently less interesting. Mr. Hounsou, who first came to attention as a noble African in “Amistad” and has often had to play the same role since, must be awfully tired of holding his head up so high.
“Blood Diamond” means well, but it also means box-office business. Hollywood has always traveled to faraway places (or at least tricked out sound stages) to spin yarns about moral calamity perfumed with the exotic. Whether down Mexico way or in Morocco, it generally kept the atmospheric extras — the snake-hipped dancing girl, the scoundrel in the burnoose, the smiler in the fez — stashed in the background, where they wouldn’t distract from the star attractions. “Blood Diamond” wants to bring those blurred figures closer into view, notably through Solomon. But the rushing camerawork, breakneck editing, compulsion to go, go, go onto the next genre beat mean that there is next to no time for such niceties. The faces remain obscured, the voices muted, even as Danny comes sharply into focus.
The tragedy of Sierra Leone and the complicity of Americans, who buy more diamonds than any other consumers in the world, deserve louder, more clamorous attention than the occasional news report. And certainly big-budget Hollywood action films are plenty loud and plenty clamorous, and the volume is only turned up to shrieking with the addition of the international heartthrob who, by sacrificing himself on the altar of love in “Titanic,” conquered a generation of young female fans (the same demographic most likely to brandish a rock on its ring finger).
Yet while Mr. DiCaprio turns out to be an ideal fit for “Blood Diamond,” there’s an insolvable disconnect between this serious story and the frivolous way it has been told. There is no reason to doubt the filmmakers’ sincerity; only their filmmaking.
VolverThe action in “Volver” moves back and forth between a workaday neighborhood in Madrid and a windswept village in the Spanish countryside. Really, though, the movie takes place in a familiar,
enchanted land — Almodóvaria, you might call it, or maybe Pedrostan—where every room and street corner is saturated with bright color and vivid feeling and where discordant notes of violence, jealousy and fear ultimately resolve in the deeper harmonies of art.
Pedro Almodóvar, the benevolent deity of this world, has revealed it — or, rather, created it — piece by piece from one film to the next. His two previous movies, “Talk to Her” (2002) and “Bad Education” (2004), explored previously uncharted regions of masculine melodrama, while
“Volver,” whose title can be translated as “to return,” revisits the woman-centered territory of “All About My Mother” (1999) and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988). Drawing on influences ranging from Latin American telenovelas to classic Hollywood weepies and on an iconography of female endurance that includes Anna Magnani and Joan Crawford, Mr. Almodóvar has made yet another picture that moves beyond camp into a realm of wise,
luxuriant humanism.
“Volver,” full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education,” choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master. And it’s a testament to the filmmaker’s generosity of spirit that he effectively hands the movie over to its ensemble of lively and resourceful actresses, and in particular to its star, Penélope Cruz. Ms. Cruz plays Raimunda, a hard-working woman pulled in every direction by terrible events and by the needs of the women around her. At one point in the film she answers a knock on the door from her neighbor, Emilio (Carlos Blanco), one of the tiny, mostly superfluous
handful of men who appear on screen. Emilio, who clearly has a crush on Raimunda, notices a streak of blood on her neck and asks if she’s all right. “Women’s troubles,” she says with a quick smile, which is both a startlingly risqué joke and the literal truth.
Such troubles! The blood belongs to her husband, Paco (Antonio de la Torre), who has recently expired in a bright crimson pool on the kitchen floor after taking a carving knife to the belly. His killing is not exactly to be shrugged off — and he does eventually receive a proper burial of sorts
— but he is not exactly mourned either. Men, for Raimunda and her circle, tend to be malevolent, irrelevant or simply absent: straying husbands, predators, dead bodies. They cause a fair amount of trouble, but the point of “Volver” is that it’s not about them. It is about what American feminists of an earlier era called sisterhood, and also about the complicated bonds of kinship and friendship that Mr. Almodóvar observed as a child growing up among women in traditional, patriarchal, gender-separated (and fascist) Spain. Raimunda’s troubles
may be extreme, but she bustles through them with passionate determination, making room for every emotion except self-pity. There are too many other people who need her sympathy, above all her teenage daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), who was subject to Paco’s lecherous, unwelcome attention. Raimunda must also tend to Sole (the wonderful Lola Dueñas), her sister, whose face registers loneliness and disappointment even as she tries to radiate busyness and good cheer; to
their elderly Aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave); and to Agustina (Blanca Portillo), a neighbor whose sorrows could easily fill another movie. There is also a restaurant to run (it’s Emilio’s, but Raimunda takes over in his absence) and, on the other side of the screen, an audience to tease,
charm, provoke and wrap around one of her long, expressive fingers. With this role Ms. Cruz inscribes her name near the top of any credible list of present-day flesh-and-blood screen goddesses, in no small part because she manages to be earthy, unpretentious and a little vulgar
without shedding an ounce of her natural glamour. What’s more, Mr. Almodóvar has had the sly inspiration to cast Carmen Maura, one of the stars of his early, madcap period, as Raimunda’s mother, who seems to have returned from the dead to add a touch of the gothic (and the
surreal) to the proceedings. Ms. Maura’s warm good humor is a crucial element in the film’s emotional design. It is a chronicle, mostly, of tragedy and horror, rendered in bright, happy colors.
To relate the details of the narrative — death, cancer, betrayal, parental abandonment, more death — would create an impression of dreariness and woe. But nothing could be further from the spirit of “Volver,” which is buoyant without being flip, and consoling without ever becoming
maudlin. Mr. Almodóvar acknowledges misfortune — and takes it seriously — from a perspective that is essentially comic. Very few filmmakers have managed to smile so convincingly in the face of misery and fatality: Jean Renoir and Billy Wilder come immediately to mind, and Mr. Almodóvar, if he is not yet their equal, surely belongs in their company. “Volver” is often dazzling in its artifice — José Luis Alcaine’s ripe cinematography, Alberto Iglesias’s suave, heart-tugging score — but it is never false. It draws you in, invites you to linger and makes you eager to return. It offers something better than realism. The real world, after all, is where we all have to live; for some of us, though, Mr. Almodóvar’s world is home.
