Joe Queenan
Friday January 5, 2007
Guardian UK
Eighteen years ago, Edward Zwick made the very well-thought-of film Glory, in which a ragtag group of feisty young black men are whipped into shape by a white guy played by the actor who brought Ferris Bueller to life - with help from the white guy who once played the Princess Bride's boyfriend, the Princess Groom. Last year, James Gartner made a very well-thought-of film called Glory Road, in which a ragtag group of feisty young black men are whipped into shape by a white guy played by an actor most famous for helping his fellow shipwreckees escape from the capsized ocean liner in Poseidon.
Now Zwick himself is back with a film in which a feisty but hapless black guy is whipped into shape by a white guy played by an actor who first achieved fame by playing a mentally handicapped boy in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? If there is anything black people the world over have learned from Hollywood - and there isn't a whole lot - it's that no matter how bleak the situation seems, they can always rely on some resourceful, charismatic and, in some instances, shapely white person to bail them out.
The Zwick film in question is the exciting but characteristically idiotic Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a ruthless Rhodesian smuggler who specialises in spiriting precious stones out of war-torn nations whose diamonds the G8 nations have promised not to purchase, as the profits are invariably used to do very bad things. They are called "conflict diamonds".
While serving a shockingly brief stint in a Sierra Leone prison for violating that sovereign nation's contraband smuggling rules, DiCaprio happens upon the information that a fellow prisoner (Djimon Hounsou) has hidden a priceless pink diamond on a river bank somewhere in the hinterland while enslaved by the thoroughly revolting rebels who have also turned his 11-year-old son into a murderer. Vicious, corrupt, armed and dangerous, DiCaprio is the protege of a South African mercenary and diamond merchant played by the vengeful 5,000-year-old pharaonic aide-de-camp who comes back to life in The Mummy and makes things miserable for everybody.
Thoroughly unprincipled, handy with firearms, brandishing the most flamboyant Rhodesian accent to grace the silver screen in decades, and not particularly nice, the stone-free DiCaprio does not initially look like the white man who will help Hounsou find his son, escape from Sierra Leone, bring corrupt white diamond merchants to justice and live happily ever after. No, that role would seem to fall to the radiant Jennifer Connelly, here playing an American journalist determined to make the world safe for democracy, if not through her literary skills, then by transfixing an entire continent with her Children of the Corn stare and putting them all to sleep in a kind of hypnotically induced ceasefire. As was the case in Requiem for a Dream, Pollock, A Beautiful Mind, House of Sand and Fog, The Hulk and Dark Water, Connelly's mere presence in a film guarantees that things will turn out badly for the male lead, as Connelly is always cast as the Angel of Death. Fun to hang out with, great eyes, amazing eyebrows, but the Angel of Death.
Despite Connelly's beatific stature as the White Journalist Who Cares - and Cares Deeply - she gradually finds her role as the anointed one filched from right under her by the morally recrudescent DiCaprio. For, as the film proceeds, and as more and more horrible black rebels kill off horrible black soldiers representing the horrible black regime - every black person in the film is either a victim or a monster - DiCaprio gradually comes to realise that there are more important things in life than money, that ebony needs ivory, that diamonds are not forever.
Zwick would thus have us believe that in a society ravaged by a murderous civil war, where black children are routinely kidnapped and induced to murder other black children, after being shot up with heroin purchased with conflict diamonds from horrible white people from out of town, the man who will ultimately bring the villains to justice is a formally depraved Rhodesian mercenary who now prefers justice and racial harmony to wealth. Hmmm, say I to Mr Zwick. Hmmm!
Blood Diamond joins a growing body of films set in Africa in which good vanquishes evil because morally upstanding white folks ultimately triumph over truly satanic white folks. Meanwhile, the entire black African population kind of takes a back seat and watches the honkies duke it out. For example, in The Constant Gardener, Rachel Weisz plays an incorruptible white woman who is murdered by a gang of racially mixed thugs in the employ of the thoroughly evil white man Bill Nighy, all because she has stumbled upon damning proof that white-owned pharmaceutical companies - the very worst kind - have been secretly using ordinary black people as guinea pigs in their perfidious experiments. Bad white people! Bad! But, by the end of the film, the very wicked, very white Nighy will be packed off to the calaboose thanks to the efforts of the very saintly and even more pasty-faced Ralph Fiennes, who lays down his own life for the benefit of impoverished black Africans. To which an entire continent of otherwise invisible black people joyously exclaim: "Hear, hear! Hats off to White Folks!"
Hard-done-by Africans also get a surprising helping hand from white folks in The Interpreter, in which Nicole Kidman plays an African-born translator who accidentally discovers that perfidious black men are planning an a**a**ination involving black men who are not nearly as perfidious. She is able to do this because she is the wrong place at the right time and because the men are speaking in an obscure language that only two white people on the entire planet have mastered: Nicole Kidman and David Attenborough. These films derive directly from such motion pictures as A Dry White Season and Cry the Beloved Country, where the evil that white men do gets swept under the rug by the good that other white men do. In all of these movies the same message comes through: Yes, some white people are bad. Oh, so very, very bad! But when white people are good, well, nobody does it better. That's just the way white people are.
The template for the Up With Caucasians! film was established in 1962 with the release of Robert Mulligan's preposterously overrated To Kill a Mockingbird. Based on a beloved, fabulously successful, thoroughly absurd novel by Harper Lee, who never wrote another book, To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of two white children living in the Deep South in the 1930s who gradually come to realise what a heroic figure their father cuts after he courageously defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.
The self-congratulatory motion picture was released at a time that black men were still being lynched in the South. Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it. The notion that a black farmhand accused of raping a white woman in the 1930s - 30 years before the film was made - would have ever reached the courthouse in Dixie is somewhat fanciful, as is the director's refusal to dress the white trash who come to bust the innocent man out of jail in the customary garb of the era: freshly laundered sheets. Instead, they are portrayed as hapless rustics who have temporarily misplaced their moral compa** and merely need to come to their senses. You know: Good Ol' Boys.
Pioneeringly foolish, To Kill a Mockingbird establishes the basic theme of all Three Cheers for Whitey! movies: Yes, there are many bad white people out there who do some terrible, terrible things to black people. But when the chips are down and black people are poised on the very precipice of disaster, they can always rely on some thoroughly decent white folks to step in and make sure that justice prevails.
This is the spirit that animates films as varied as Mississippi Burning, where Gene Hackman plays a racist FBI agent who helps bring murderous Klansmen to justice, and A Time to Kill, a typically knuckleheaded Joel Schumacher offering starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock as crusading white folks who will do anything to ensure that Samuel L Jackson gets justice in the Deep South. For that matter, it is the theme of Glory Road, a film about an all-black basketball team that beat an all-white basketball team for the 1965 collegiate basketball championship in a truly legendary, watershed contest that changed American society forever, and whose star is the very white Josh Lucas, who plays the black athletes' coach. This is like making a movie about heavyweight boxers in the late 20th century where the champion is a short white guy from south Philadelphia. Who would buy a premise like that?
Given the very nature of the industry - movies are driven by stars, and most stars tend to be good-looking white people - it is hardly surprising that so many motion pictures celebrating truly wonderful white folks should hit the screens. Still, I don't know how black people can stand this stuff. In fact, I don't know how Japanese people can stand it. Zwick, who seems to specialise in historically improbable multicultural films, also made the hilarious The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise as a pistol-packin' mercenary who does everything he can to preserve Japan's rapidly dying samurai tradition from the encroachments of rifle-bearing locals on the payroll of avaricious westerners.
In Blood Diamond, Zwick is back to his old tricks. Yes, those darned Caucasians back in foggy olde London Towne are stirring up trouble in West Africa by illicitly trafficking in conflict diamonds. And that's making life hard for innocent black people, even though the nastiest villains in the film are blacks. But once a couple of gifted, determined white folks arrive on the scene, you can rest a**ured that the grapes of wrath will get trampled in the Lord's vineyard with the help of Leonardo DiCaprio's terrible swift sword, Luger, AK-47, whatever. To hear Connelly tell it, this whole damn war would come to a screeching halt if only white men back in Beverly Hills would stop buying conflict diamonds for their trashy girlfriends.
"People back home wouldn't buy a diamond ring if they knew it had cost someone a hand," says Connelly.
Says who?
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
