(Warning:  possible spoilers) 
These movies are both recommended, though not for children – they’re strong medicine.  Blood Diamond is a historical drama focusing on the diamond trade in Sierra Leone.  Sweeney Todd is based on Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical.  It doesn’t attempt to be realistic;  the cartoon-like violence centers around a legendary figure, a kind of fictionalized Jack the Ripper.  Somehow, the music and lyrics transcend the horrible subject so that we see a mass murderer with both compassion and humor (of a very macabre sort).  

While these two movies aren’t at all the same kind of thing, in a way the stories are similar and I get some insights by reflecting on them together.  Sweeney Todd (played by Johnny Depp) and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) are peaceful men, unjustly uprooted from their homes and separated from their families.  Both make great efforts to get back to their families, and for both of them there is a possibility:  the lost family members are, in fact, there to be found.  But the stories unravel very differently.  Solomon Vandy keeps looking long enough to find his lost loved ones.  Sweeney Todd, embittered and looking only for revenge, actually meets his beloved family members but doesn’t recognize them.

I think the difference is hope.  Sweeney Todd gives up hope in his very first scene.  It’s not a subtle choice – he actually has a conversation with a fresh-faced young sailor named Anthony Hope.  Sweeney likes him, but dismisses him as naïve:  ‘You will learn.’  When he returns to his home of fifteen years before, he finds his wife and child long gone and hears rumors of his wife’s death by suicide.  Sweeney accepts the rumor as true, and from then on gives himself over to seeking revenge on the men who have wronged him.

Solomon makes the opposite choice from Sweeney, betting on hope against tremendous odds.  Many people are interested in Solomon because of a rare diamond he has found and hidden;  Solomon himself is the only one who cares about his life and his family.  Danny Archer (Leonardo diCaprio), a cynical diamond smuggler, tells Solomon that except for the diamond, he’s worthless, “just one more black man in Africa.”  The scale of the violence indeed seems so large – whole villages burned and massacred, millions of people displaced – that one family can easily seem not to matter.

Yet, Solomon steadfastly refuses to abandon the search for his family.  He’s got the opposite kind of tunnel vision from Sweeney.  Sometimes Solomon sees hope where there isn’t anything to see – for example, on one occasion he believes he recognizes his missing son, and bursts out from his hiding place calling his son’s name.  But the boy he saw isn’t his son, and Solomon has succeeded only in revealing his hiding place to the enemy.

Almost everybody in Blood Diamond is looking for that rare diamond.  I saw Blood Diamond with a church group, and one question asked was what the ‘diamond’ really stands for.  It’s only a rock, of course (watch for what eventually happens to it at the end!)  Why do people want it so much?  Mike Archer imagines it will get him out of Africa and that will somehow provide him the happiness he’s missed all his life.  This turns out to be a false vision;  yet, as he pursues it he gains a clearer vision and maybe, something better. 

Hope can be a choice, but it’s also a grace to know what to hope for.  Sweeney Todd misses the grace and the result is tragic.  Solomon Vandy has the grace and you can see its effect in his life and the lives of those around him.  Our own lives probably don't have that Hollywood quality, but that grace is out there for us too.