You had to feel bad for Andy Garcia right at the beginning of the screening of his film “Diamond” at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night.
The film opens with all the trappings of film noir in the 1940s and ’50s, with grainy photos of Angels Flight, Chinatown, the Bradbury Building and other landmarks. Somebody drops the tonearm on a old-fashioned record player and some moody jazz fills a darkened room. A man, seen mostly in shadow, irons a pocket handkerchief and then selects his wardrobe from a closet full of white shirts and dark suits. He reaches for a handful of business cards that read “Joe Diamond, Private Investigator,” dons a Fedora and walks out of an old brick building in downtown Los Angeles … where he’s almost run over by a Waymo, those ubiquitous white self-driving cars that have taken over the rideshare business lately.
At a screening in L.A., that visual joke would have killed. In the Grand Theatre Lumiere on the Croisette in the South of France, it was met with dead silence.
Either the French take their noir very, very seriously, or they haven’t seen Waymos yet. Or both. Either way, it was an inauspicious beginning for Garcia’s film, which puts a spin on the beloved genre but requires an audience with a sense of humor, a heart and a passing familiarity with the genre trappings that writer-director-star-and-co-composer Garcia is both affectionately saluting and also sending up.
It was the second big Cannes premiere in the last few days for a director better known as an actor, and Garcia is definitely the winner in any faceoff between “Diamond” and John Travolta’s “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” which premiered on Friday. The project grew out of a literature class project of Garcia’s daughter in high school 20 years ago, and at times it betrays its amateur beginnings with clunky plotting – but it’s miles more ambitious and more assured than Travolta’s treatment of a children’s book he wrote in 1997.
And Garcia recruited a formidable cast for his low-budget, quick shoot. He plays Joe Diamond, a private dick who appears stuck in the 1940s and oblivious to the fact that he’s a hit on TikTok; Vicky Krieps is Sharon Cobb, who’s hired Joe to figure out who killed her husband, a crime for which she’s being accused; Bill Murray is Jimbo, the bartender and part-time lawyer at a downtown joint; Rosemarie DeWitt is Angel, a flirtatious regular at the same joint; Dustin Hoffman is Dr. Harry Kleinman, a coroner who just loves bending the rules for Joe; Brenda Fraser is “Danny Boy” McVicar, who might be a bad cop but also wants to be Joe’s friend; and Demian Bichir, Danny Huston, LaTanya Richardson, Robert Patrick and others fill out the cast.
Los Angeles stars in the film as well, with locations including the Bradbury Building and the now-closed Cole’s restaurant. Between the cast and the city, it’s enough to make a viewer wish that some of Joe’s narration was more hard-boiled and less over-easy and some of his apparently fabulous detecting actually looked impressive while he was doing it. But the point is to have fun with the noir trappings, and Garcia and his all-star team certainly do that.
Hoffman wins the award for gleeful scenery-chewing, while DeWitt might take top honors for packing the most humanity into her performance. She does so mostly in the film’s homestretch, when “Diamond” drops a surprise that grounds what has come before in genuine emotion and helps explain why Joe Diamond has often seemed to be playacting as a great detective rather than actually being one.
But he’s dogged, and so is Garcia, who brings the story to an agreeable conclusion and then keeps going until he’s hunted down and tied every loose end he can find. Screening out of competition, “Diamond” isn’t going to go down as one of the more accomplished or substantial of this year’s Cannes films, but there’s nothing wrong with adding a little heart and humor to the usual film noir recipe.
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