African Doubleheader

Last Wednesday I caught Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, and in retrospect I should have gone down to the West Bank for an African meal in between, instead of sushi, had I realized I was going for that much African tragedy in one night. The most engrossing, intense theatre experience I ever had was a performance of Macbeth set in West Africa, complete with fright wigs and machetes, and these films certainly tied into the same violent spectacle.

Blood Diamond is a pretty straightforward, some say cliche, story of a father (Djimon Honsou) kidnapped and sent to Sierra Leone's diamond mines, who finds an enormous pink diamond and uses it as leverage to find his family, with the help of a cute but manipulative smuggler (Leonardo Di Caprio) and the earnest reporter in an open necked shirt (Jennifer Connelly) who falls for him. The problems of the film that numerous reviews will comment on come from trying to set a high moral tone and make an important film about the exploitation of Africa's minerals, and the feeling that such a traditional story told in a high-minded way has a certain inevitability to its plot, as everyone must either get their just rewards or punishment, or if they're a crooked smuggler with a heart of gold, achieve salvation. However, even if it's not told in an innovative way, that story is at least told well.

So while some rolled their eyes a little bit, for me what's good about Blood Diamond far overshadows its limitations. And it does achieve its moral objective (using Jennifer Connelly as a Mary Sue), which is to put a real sense of the horror of conflict diamonds to a wider audience of diamond consumers in wealthier countries. I suspect that if this movie, which is set in 1998, had come out a few years ago in support of the Kimberley Process and not after it, or while Sierra Leone and the antics of certain mercenary groups were still fresh topics, its message would have been received as more relevant than preachy. It doesn't help that last year's Oscars featured Hollywood patting itself on the back for championing yesterday's social issues, and Blood Diamond sadly gets caught in that, making me wonder if this screenplay wasn't buried in some exec's drawer for a few years. On the other hand, diamonds aren't the only mineral supporting armed conflict in Africa so maybe the failure is the film's inabilty to suggest that it's about more than Sierra Leone.

It is also a great look at Africa (I should qualify that by admitting I've got no particular knowledge of West Africa, so I can't speak to how accurate a depiction it is). It's still a step closer than we usually get, since early on the film spends a fair bit of time following Danny Archer (Di Caprio) through Freetown. This may be just my own perception, but Western filmmakers don't spend a lot of time in Urban Africa, or looking at industries like mining and energy. Given the probable importance of the Niger delta to an energy-hungry world, it's odd that pastoral peoples like the Samburu and Masai get more screen time, and it's why a film like Tsotsi seemed so startling for depicting side by side shanty town gangsters and a modern train station and gated homes.

One of the criticisms of Blood Diamond has been that it's told from a white person's perspective, but given its political ambitions, that's where it needed to be. The two perspectives on Africa are the cynical native-born mercenary smuggler and the ignorant in her idealism American journalist, but there is some awareness of this within the film. In a film about exploitation, these two are particularly suited as guides. Archer is all about exploitation with only some sense of fair trade to act as a moral compass, but the idealistic journalist is not actually the moral barometer of the film, since she has to acknowledge her own role in shaping what Africa is to the world: a victim, passively exploited without any consciousness of its own agency. The stories of victimized Africans make thiem into such a flat image of tragedy, with faceless tormentors rather than actual people who live in the same world as her readers; they are separated more by the level of reality they reside, than by geography. The moral barometer is Djimon Honsou as Soloman Vandy, who has an actual purposeful life populated by real people and not images, and both white people nevertheless reduce him to a couple of photograph captions and his only possession, the diamond.

There's a subplot ignored in all of the reviews I've read as well, and that is the graphic, brainwashing violence of the RUF. From chopping off hands in a symbolic act to protest democracy to their mining operations, they are clearly the primary antagonist. The element that's interesting about them is the subplot with Vandy's son Dia being recruited as a child soldier, and the transformation required to survive that ordeal, the rites of forced violence and drugs, and creation of a violent new persona, in Dia's case renaming himself "See Me No More". This effect of creating armies of violent children, remaining very much emotionally children but with the capability for violence of the most hardened men, is a truly frightening phenomenon that exists far beyond Africa. The only mention of it, or the violence and intimidation in failed states, in any review I read was to suggest that the film was too violent, as if the solution was to ignore the message about Western consumption supporting violence and instead continue to turn our heads. Democracy and violence, making sure children pick up a gun rather than go to school, sounds like issues we find ourselves embroiled in outside of Africa.

Now that I've written god knows how much about it, what I really enjoyed most about this movie had nothing to do with message or politics, or all the analysis I can muster up. I just really loved watching these actors prance through a lush African setting. I've been a big Leonardo Di Caprio admirer since before he did Titanic, and just listening to him talk in this movie was a treat. His Zimbabwe accent and the Krio he uses in Sierra Leone along with the melodic charm of his character made it a captivating performance, and I found myself thinking of some of his casual expressions after the film. Archer's conversations with pretty much anyone in the film were shiny in Leo's Zimbabwe banter. Djimon Honsou as always brings such a dominant presence to the screen his every movement held my attention. And for the first time in a long time, Jennifer Connelly looked like she'd been enjoying good food and fresh air, because she looked quite good.

The characters may seem a little thin, a little cliche, but I do think the film redeems some of that by presenting over the course of the film by grounding enough of Danny Archer's cynicism in the details of his past that he becomes something other than a stock character, and Archer's amusement at the earnestness of Djimon Honsou's Solomon Vandy reminds us that Vandy is an unusual man. The sharpness of his insights into Connelly's Maddy Bowen tear the veneer of the earnest do-good reporter she is playing enough to suggest a deeper human character underneath,. This is perhaps the whole point of the film, that these images, these characters from this tale of Sierra Leone were not fully formed into their roles, something made them this way just as the real conflict didn't spring out of the red earth fully formed and impenetrable to outside forces. It isn't enough to throw up our hands and say there will always be Danny Archers and Colonel Coetzees and Captain Poisons, because as the film shows briefly with Dia's indoctrination and Danny's history as a soldier, these people and their country were formed, and perhaps can be reformed.

The other Africa film I saw was The Last King of Scotland, the story of the rise and fall of Idi Amin in Uganda from the perspective of his personal physician, a very different experience. Nicholas Garrigan travels from Scotland to Uganda on a lark, and by a chance meeting becomes the president's doctor and by the murderous whims of the mercurial Amin becomes the dictator's closest advisor.

What's so fascinating about this is that we only see Amin through Garrigan's eyes, although the benefit of history gives us a certain cynical insight that Garrigan lacks, allowing to see more of what Garrigan's enthusiasm and Amin's charm glosses over. The youthful Garrigan basks almost entirely in the charm of Amin, and in the promise of an independent African state led by a man of Amin's stature. Garrigan is further pushed towards Amin by his Brittish peers' distrust of Amin, which he assumes is the racist cynicism of the former empire that can't stand to see a black nation rise. It takes Garrigan far too long to see the stituation he has gotten himself into, and he does not see the dangers in his carefree Ugandan odyssey until long after the point of no return. In the end each notes about the other that there is something childlike in the way they view the world, believing it cannot hurt them no matter how far they push.

The reason to see this film is Forest Whitaker. He plays Amin with the perfect mix of charm and terror, and I couldn't help but grin and (and sometimes shudder) watching every scene he was in. I've always had a soft spot for Forest Whitaker since Good Morning, Vietnam but now I want to rewatch that movie because I can't believe it was the same guy. Apparently he also had some trouble abandoning the persona of the Ugandan dictator after spending months immersing himself in all things Idi Amin preparing for the role, and couldn't shake the accent for a long time, so if he doesn't get an Oscar for this, he may hang Leonardo Di Caprio by his skin backstage.

James McAvoy puts in a great performance as Nicholas Garrigan, bubbling with this infectious enthusiasm that enticed me to see Amin through his eyes. Some of Garrigan's story is a little thin, but McAvoy helps a lot with the energy he brings to it. And it's nice to know Gillian Anderson is alive and well and still has an agent (I also liked her contribution to last year's A Cock and Bull Story).

Seriously a great evening, two great films and some great octopus in between. And don't get excited, PJ, I said a cock and BULL story, and it's an adaptation of an 18th century postmodern novel, not Peter North's latest oeuvre.