I have renewed appreciation for the 2006 Edward Zwick film Blood Diamond, having watched it again recently. When I first saw this movie I reacted to the commercial movie treatment of the violent tragedy it portrays, that of fomenting civil strife in Sierra Leone, brainwashing children to commit murder, the maiming, murder, raping, exiling, traumatizing of hundreds of thousands of people for the purpose of acquiring diamonds, wealth, power and control.
Set against this backdrop Leonardo DiCaprio plays a savvy smuggler with a swagger, an erstwhile dormant conscience, and a love of Africa. Amidst the roiling violence of civil war and his indefatigable pursuit of a golf ball sized pink diamond, DiCaprio's’s swashbuckling character meets a foxy journalist who is after the facts. She aims to expose the west’s hand in all this misery, from a corporate stranglehold on the flow of diamonds into a marketplace that sells the idea that a diamond represents love, to public and personal complicity, and she wants DiCaprio's’s help.
I shuddered both times I sat through the violent invasion, torture, and killing scenes in this movie because while to me it is cinema to others it is reality. Where had I been, I wondered when I first saw this movie, that I had had only a vague notion of all this prior to seeing the movie? And I have traveled somewhat more than the average US citizen, I think, and am perhaps also somewhat more educated. So, while I first thought this movie contrived and perhaps even a little exploitative, I was also glad a lot of people were seeing it. Perhaps they’d think twice about what diamonds really represent. I certainly had.
After seeing the movie again, I likewise think it both much more ambitious and complex than I’d originally thought. There’s a positive twist on the end of this movie that seems to perpetrate false hope, but I guess it is true that some people do good things some of the time.
