It’s astonishing how few Hollywood movies tell us anything about the way we spend a third or more of our lives—at work. Maybe this is because the standard industry perception is that people don’t like to think about that part of their existence when they go to movies, that people want to keep their professions and pleasures separate and mutually alienated. The assumption seems to be that work isn’t supposed to be fun but movies are.
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Cohen has found a great American subject with potentially epic dimensions, and though only the first third of the movie makes it the main bill of fare, the sense of vast reaches that pervades this section carries over to the rest. I don’t want to suggest that we’re inundated with facts and figures or given a seminar on the subject. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” Ernest Hemingway once said in an interview. “There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.” This is true not only of Cohen’s storytelling but of Forster’s acting; he can imply more with shrugs and eye movements than most actors can manage with their entire bodies.
The rookie, Bobby Walker (Donnie Wahlberg), is less than half Eddie’s age, and his opposite in most respects: he prefers rock to jazz and carousing with waitresses to having a good woman at home, and his braggadocio seems calculated to affront Eddie’s quiet, low profile. (Wahlberg serves to offset Forster’s minimalism with diverse kinds of excess, something he does with style and gusto.) Nevertheless the two gradually become buddies as Eddie teaches Bobby the trade.
Cohen reports that Eddie was basically inspired by his father, and I suspect that most people have some version of an Eddie, a Bobby, and even a Katie kicking around in their lives. Diamond Men may wind up close to fantasy, yet it’s a fantasy that we sense has been lived.
Directed and written by Daniel M. Cohen
With Robert Forster, Donnie Wahlberg, Bess Armstrong, Jasmine Guy, George Coe, Jeff Gendelman, Nikki Fritz, and Shannah Laumeister.
