{"id":459372,"date":"2026-05-21T02:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/459372\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T02:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T02:40:08","slug":"diamond-review-andy-garcia-directs-a-charming-but-slight-neo-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/459372\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Diamond’ Review: Andy Garcia Directs a Charming but Slight Neo-Noir"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the opening scene of \u201cDiamond<\/a>,\u201d we watch Andy Garcia<\/a>, as a Los Angeles detective who looks like he stepped out of a Hollywood movie from the \u201940s, put on his private-eye regalia \u2014 the three-piece suit, the pocket handkerchief he carefully irons, the fedora \u2014 and then grab his money clip from a tray of artifacts before he goes out. The movie, with its period trappings and mournful jazz soundtrack, appears to be priming us for some old-fashioned moody film-noir fun. But then Garcia\u2019s detective, terse and fastidious, introducing himself as \u201cDiamond, Joe Diamond,\u201d steps out into the streets of L.A., and the first thing to confront him is a police car that\u2019s right out of the 21st century. So are the streets, the skyscrapers, the restaurants. They\u2019re all Los Angeles today. So what\u2019s this relic of a detective doing smack in the middle of it?<\/p>\n

\n\tFor a while, \u201cDiamond\u201d almost looks like a surrealist comedy, as Joe tools around the city in his vintage green 1940s Ford DeLuxe convertible, having encounters with people who are totally contemporary, while he himself remains a pure piece of period pulp. \u201cThe Long Goodbye,\u201d Robert Altman\u2019s funny and dazed 1973 riff on the Hollywood detective mystique, featured a Philip Marlowe \u2014 played by a sleepy-eyed, shambling Elliott Gould \u2014 who was a gumshoe out of water, only the movie presented him as an L.A. eccentric, lost in his movie-fed dreams. \u201cDiamond,\u201d by contrast, looks like it could be a Woody Allen fantasy comedy like \u201cMidnight in Paris,\u201d with a hero who\u2019s literally a man out of time. <\/p>\n

\n\tGarcia, who wrote and directed the movie, has come up with some crisply clever faux-noir dialogue, and part of the joke is that Joe speaks in his hardboiled pens\u00e9es while everyone else talks like a normal person. \u201cI always know what they mean,\u201d he says. \u201cEven when they don\u2019t mean it.\u201d Bogart (or maybe Yogi Berra) couldn\u2019t have put it better. Garcia sets this all up in a sly way, without overstating it. The people Joe meets may mock his antique quality, but they take him seriously. No one questions that he is the way he is. Maybe that\u2019s because of his one claim to fame \u2014 he rescued a flamingo that had been kidnapped (for its valuable fathers), and now that\u2019s part of his legend. All driven by social media, of course, even though Joe himself wouldn\u2019t dream of carrying a cell phone.<\/p>\n

\n\tI would have been happy to watch the Woody Allen version of this movie, and \u201cDiamond,\u201d for a while, is an amusing mystery-satire. Much of it is set in prewar L.A. locations like the Bradbury Building, which are milked for their seedy nostalgic grandeur. And what saves the character of Joe from terminal quaintness is that Garcia draws on the gruff, slightly jaded quality that he has acquired with age. His Joe is a real cynic, with demons in his closet; his rejoinders come from a tough place.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film lures us into a mystery that\u2019s a knowing gloss on all those old detective movies, as Joe is hired by Sharon Cobbs (Vicky Krieps<\/a>), a platinum-blonde femme fatale whose older tycoon husband was just murdered. She\u2019s the chief suspect \u2014 in fact, the only suspect. There are sinister types on the sidelines, and a corrupt cop, McVicar (Brendan Fraser<\/a>), who is Joe\u2019s long-time frenemy; he\u2019s already planning to nail Sharon for the crime. But why is everyone so certain that she did it? It looks like a frame-up, as the movie establishes a tone that\u2019s two parts \u201cThe Big Sleep,\u201d two parts \u201cChinatown,\u201d and one part Woody Allen meets \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYou can feel Garcia\u2019s joy in reviving these old-movie tropes, and the plot he\u2019s comes up with seems sturdy enough to work on its own terms. But right around the time that Danny Huston shows up as some sort of Mr. Big (we\u2019re cued to notice that he\u2019s the son of John Huston, who played the heavy in \u201cChinatown\u201d), the plot, which we think is going to expand into a ripe conspiracy, ends up taking a back seat.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe focus turns to Diamond himself. He hangs out in the legendary L.A. bar Cole\u2019s French Dip (the place that invented the French dip sandwich and has been open since 1908). There, he drinks rye with his longtime bartender buddy, played by Bill Murray. One night, into the bar wanders Angel (Rosemarie DeWitt), who looks as caught in the \u201940s as Joe is. It might be love at first sight, as they stare moonily at each other and then go out to dance. But it turns out that these two have a past. And the more we learn about Joe\u2019s past, the more we learn why he is the way he is.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs that happens, the movie, appealing as it is, begins to sag. \u201cDiamond,\u201d while it has a built-in irreverence (notably when Dustin Hoffman shows up as a coroner obsessed with telling bad jokes), actually depended on our having a dramatic investment in the conspiracy it set up. When Garcia turns his attention to Joe Diamond\u2019s traumatic backstory, the air starts to leak out of the plot. The second half of \u201cDiamond\u201d feels more fully worked out on paper than it plays onscreen. Yet it\u2019s a movie I enjoyed much of, and am glad I saw. A great deal of tender loving care, and Hollywood obsession, has been poured into it, and it\u2019s amusing to see how the quality that\u2019s always made Andy Garcia such an appealing actor \u2014 his way of being direct but holding something back with a twinkle \u2014 fits so snugly into an old-movie reverie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the opening scene of \u201cDiamond,\u201d we watch Andy Garcia, as a Los Angeles detective who looks like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[81114,5932,10532,37835,93,61,60,270,5236],"class_list":["post-459372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andy-garcia","tag-brendan-fraser","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-diamond","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-vicky-krieps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}