Finding a Story Through the Fog of War
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Many people, when they see misery around them, want to know why. But Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a smuggler who spends most of “Blood Diamond” racing through Sierra Leone’s civil war in pursuit of profit, has already got an explanation: “T.I.A.” It stands for “This Is Africa.” He abandoned all hope for this benighted part of the world long ago.
Many moviegoers these days reserve a similar, if markedly less tragic, cynicism for Hollywood: It will never make big, big-hearted pictures like it used to. “Blood Diamond,” however, offers reason to believe. Directed by Edward Zwick and written by Charles Leavitt, it very nearly achieves that perfect balance of humanity and big-screen spectacle that many believe left American movies decades ago.
What must be added here is that you’d never know it from the trailer, which highlights Mr. DiCaprio’s worst moments with the difficult white-African accent he’s adopted for the role (Archer is a native of Zimbabwe) and squishes the film’s graceful action-drama storyline into a spasm of screams and explosions. The previews also fail to portend the remarkable assurance with which Mr. DiCaprio portrays Archer, a wily soldier of fortune. This is the toughest customer Mr. DiCaprio has ever played, including the undercover cop he played this year in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed.” This underdog character has moved well beyond the sulking adolescent stage; he has nothing left to prove (he’s also a racist). Archer, a former mercenary, is used to working under pressure, and while Mr. DiCaprio imbues this jaded professional with his trademark roguish charm, his squeaky voice seems to roughen in that exotic accent.
Archer is introduced cutting a deal with a commander of the R.U.F., the gangsterish rebel group that brought more than a decade of violent turmoil to Sierra Leone when it launched a campaign to unseat the sitting government 1991. The rebels fund their bloody advance on the capital with diamonds from their mines; Archer has no moral quandary about buying — he even uses automatic weapons as currency. Archer smuggles the illegal gems into neighboring Liberia, where they are exported abroad — only this time, he gets caught. While in jail, he learns of an enormous diamond hidden near one of the rebel mines. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou),a fellow prisoner and former laborer at the mines, is the only one who knows where it is.
Solomon looks redoubtable (Mr. Hounsou is built like a gladiator), but he has a heart of gold, and he is desperate to find his wife and children, who were captured when rebels raided his village. Archer offers to help him find them if Solomon will lead him to the diamond. Solomon smells trouble, but Archer nastily persuades him to say yes: “Without me, you’re just another black man in Africa.”
Convinced his continent has no future, Archer plans to jump ship once he nabs the diamond, assuming he can outwit his boss (Arnold Vosloo), the head of a South African mercenary outfit operating in Sierra Leone. Archer knows he’s a scoundrel, but he doesn’t consider himself any worse than feckless foreign aid workers or the millions around the world who buy wedding stones that come from Sierra Leone.
Enter Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a hardened American journalist with a few sparks of idealism left in her. She bats her eyelashes at Archer one night in a bar; when she discovers he deals in hot rocks, she gets intrigued: This could be the scoop to end the “blood diamond” trade, and by extension, the war.
She gets interested in Archer, too. Does he have a good side? Ms. Connelly and Mr. DiCaprio don’t generate much heat, but that’s primarily because Archer is too busy romancing the hundred-carat stone. While the raven-haired actress may represent a certain fantasy of the female foreign correspondent (she first appears wearing a short denim skirt), she has a glint of craziness in her blue eyes that suits a war junkie just right. Maddy fearlessly teams up with Solomon and Archer, and the three of them go caroming through the bush — and the heart of the conflict: vicious ambushes, child soldiers, legions of amputees in refugee camps, images of which are vividly rendered, free of sentimental sugar coating, by the cinematographer Eduardo Serra. Maddy files more stories about the pity of war throughout this combat-zone odyssey, but she begins to suspect that her job, like Archer’s, amounts to exploiting the victims — and at least he is polite enough not to shove a camera in their faces.
The filmmakers display a similar ambivalence about the tale they are telling, and it’s not hard to see why: Sierra Leone’s horrific recent past is the backdrop for many an adrenaline-charged action sequence; as in Ridley Scott’s Somalia-set war flick, “Black Hawk Down,” the rocket-propelled grenade, with its distinctive hiss and tail of smoke, proves a most cinematic weapon. “Blood Diamond” is entertainment with a conscience: a high-stakes adventure yarn, and the beautifully told story of one man’s change of heart.
The film’s only blemish — a minor and understandable one — is the slightly awkward shift of emphasis, in its last scenes, to the cause. The illegal diamond trade remains a problem in many African nations, albeit less of one since the implementation of strict international regulations in 2003. Like “The Constant Gardener,” last year’s excellent thriller about pharmaceutical industry crookery in Kenya, “Blood Diamond” appends a stinging message in its final frames to all the corporate profiteers out there.
But this film is about much more than lucre, and activism is what Amnesty International is for.(The group has issued a press release about how to buy gems responsibly this holiday season.) Nonetheless, “Blood Diamond” is an enormously satisfying drama, and a welcome addition to the recent spate of movies set in Africa. It does not shy away from the ritual amputations that defined the struggle in Sierra Leone, and another of the war’s signature outrages — the conscripting of children for the rebel “cause” — actually becomes a central theme. Unlike “Hotel Rwanda,” which adopted an elegiac mood and left most atrocities of that country’s conflict to the imagination, “Blood Diamond” puts the viewer in the crossfire. You feel more than a vague regret for Africa’s fate; you feel the deprivation, the brutality, the mad passion of this continent of dangerous extremes. But also a shred of hope.