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. 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 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.
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