Diamond Men (2001)
**/****
starring Robert Forster, Donnie Wahlberg, Bess Armstrong, Jasmine Guy
written and directed by Dan Cohen
by Walter Chaw Much will be written about Robert Forster’s performance in Diamond Men, Dan Cohen’s sophomore hyphenate feature, and as Forster lands an executive producer credit (daughter Kate gets the “associate producer” tag), the veteran actor’s much-deserved critical buzz this time around is a product more of design than serendipity. That doesn’t lessen the picture as a nice vehicle for Forster’s hang-dog melancholia, the quality that Tarantino’s Jackie Brown used to magnificent effect (and the one with which David Lynch played in Forster’s tantalizing Mulholland Drive cameo), but what it does do is render Diamond Men unconvincing as a drama. It’s full of contrivances of the kind that cast a grimy patina over the rest of the film–a Things Change sort of deal where the line between positive senior characters and irritating grotesqueries makes the proceedings first unpleasant and then insufferable.
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion–it’s the difference between Adam’s dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience. A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth-wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch’s piece), and a movie’s characters therefore become projections of its maker’s sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur’s use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock’s meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).