You think you know what Andy Garcia‘s Diamond is going to be right from the opening scenes as we meet 40’s style, fedora-wearing private eye Joe Diamond (Garcia) who looks, talks, and walks like he is in a film noir, the kind of B&W Bogart and Mitchum regularly gravitated to. He’s all business in his aging L.A. office with his secretary, Elizabeth (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), but as he emerges into the daylight to his 1940’s convertible, a Waymo drives right by in front of him. Suddenly Diamond has fooled us.
Garcia wrote, directed, stars in , and composed the music with Arturo Sandoval for this wonderfully atmospheric, nostalgic and entertaining contemporary noir with Joe Diamond a guy who seems to have stepped in from a different era, but talented enough in solving crimes that the LAPD and District Attorney learn not to ignore him even if on the surface he looks and sounds like he might be a little loony. No, this isn’t Chinatown, Jake. It is current day Los Angeles and Diamond is on a new case, commissioned by the wealthy widow, Sharon Cobbs (Vicki Krieps), whose husband has mysteriously turned up dead and Diamond has to solve it.
Traveling across the City of Angels (there were 52 locations shot in just 25 days on a small indie budget), we see the various reactions Joe Diamond gets along the way , along with the regulars he deals with including legal eagle ‘Danny Boy’ McVicar (Brendan Fraser), bartender Jimbo (Bill Murray) who is well connected while serving up martinis, the coroner Dr. Harry Kleiman (A very funny Dustin Hoffman) with a thing for chinese food, a slippery gardner named Alberto Echevarria (Demian Bichir), the Cobbs butler (Yul Vazquez), and mystery woman, Angel (Rosemary DeWitt) among others in the large cast Garcia scraped together with the help of his veteran casting director Cathy Sandrich, and a few favors.
Another actor in the cast playing Bruce Tannenbaum is none other than Danny Huston, son of John Huston who directed 1942’s classic noir The Maltese Falcon, a sly touch as that was just one of many influences on the look and style of this one even if it was set in San Francisco. Diamond in fact also serves as a shimmering love letter to Los Angeles. The various locations are dreamlike in suggesting an L.A. that itself starred in so many of these noirs made decades ago, and with the help of ace production designer Clay A. Griffith, Cinematographer Tim Suhrstedt, and costume designer Deborah L. Scott we feel like the city has stopped in time as Garcia has found vintage areas and landmarks of the city to shoot in and let this gumshoe detective do his thing in style. In fact I kept thinking it would be great if Joe Diamond appeared in black and white while everyone else was in color, but that would suggest that this film was really just a gimmicky tribute to a bygone era and it is much more than that, as Joe Diamond is a man with his own complicated traumatic and very emotional past. As the story develops it is also given great heart and gravitas because this is a three dimensional character Garcia’s playing, , thus Diamond works on multiple levels.
The all-star cast makes this a lot of fun to watch unfold. Garcia makes the title character more than a one joke premise, and really evokes a time when these gumshoes walked the streets of L.A. He himself has dreamed of bringing it to fruition for 15 years, even initially coming up with a shell of the idea when helping his daughter (who is in the film) with a homework assignment. Adding strong contributions are Krieps as the femme fatale who sparks the investigation, DeWitt who is quite touching here, and fun if too brief, appearances of Hoffman, Murray, Fraser, and Bichir. There are many more, but still this is Garcia’s show both on the screen and behind it including a beautiful score he and Sandoval cooked up, an homage as well in some ways to what Jerry Goldsmith did in Chinatown.
With L.A. production, or lack of it, in the headlines a lot now, here is a movie waving the flag for it in ways that should be noticed. Garcia knew you can’t fake L.A. in a movie like this one It has to be authentic, and Diamond is that and more.
Producers are Garcia, Frank Mancuso Jr., Paul Soriano, Jai Stefan. It had its World Premiere tonight as part of the Cannes Film Festival Official Selection.
Title: Diamond
Festival: Cannes – Out Of Competition.
Director/Screenplay: Andy Garcia
Cast: Andy Garcia, Rosemary DeWitt, Brendan Fraser, Dustin Hoffman, Danny Huston, Bill Murray, Vicki Krieps, Robert Patrick, Rachel Ticotin, Yul Vazquez, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Demian Bichir.
Running Time: 1 hour and 58 minutesS
Sales Agent: CAA Media Finance -North America; The Veterans – International
