Blood Diamond is a thoughtful look at the arbitrary rules by which we live our lives. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Danny Archer, a humble man who takes life's homilies to heart. The film opens with Danny driving on the turnpike, fastidiously keeping one car length in front of him for every ten mph. When he finds himself behind a stretch limo, he panics, not knowing whether the formula is based on the length of his own car or the vehicle he trails.
His life gets further upended when he meets Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) at the airport as he arrives exactly two hours early for his domestic flight. She represents everything that he is not -- a free spirit who sees a corporate agenda behind every rule. “Did you ever stop to think,” she asks, “that if you lather, rinse and repeat you end up having to buy twice as much shampoo?”
Danny falls hard for Maddy. He confides to pal Solomon (Djimon Hounsou) that he intends to propose. Danny is flummoxed when Solomon explains the rule about spending two months salary on a diamond engagement ring. For the first time in his life, Danny balks at an accepted standard. “Are you telling me,” he moans, “that for two solid months I'll be bustin' my hump...for a trinket?”
After doing some research, Danny assumes that Maddy won't want a diamond ring since diamonds fund civil wars in Africa and terrorism worldwide. He also figures she will be outraged by the way open pit diamond mines ravage the environment, the fact that mine owners violate indigenous people's rights, and the travesty of bonded child laborers in India cutting and polishing the gems. When Danny presents Maddy with a plain silver band and asks for her hand in marriage, she thumps him on the forehead and tells him to focus. Two months salary is a starting point, she explains, and you calculate off of gross, not take home.
Danny learns a new rule, the one De Beers doesn't want you to know about: shallow women lead to deep debt. He refuses to go broke so that some Zales executive can buy his mistress a new Audi. Danny jettisons Maddy and embarks on a quest for spiritual enlightenment through carefree, hedonistic pursuits. A diamond may be forever, he concedes, but a man's time on Earth is very short.
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