Hidden Gem

reviewed Wed, 26 Sep 2001

Diamond Men is a pleasant little surprise, a charming, funny, low-key film about two very different men who grow to be friends.  Yes, it's another "mismatched buddies" movie, but it's cleverly written, and it's so realistic and intimate that it doesn't feel clichéd.  It reminded me a lot of Spring Forward, another understated movie about an older man teaching a younger one the ropes.  Here, steady Eddie (Robert Forster) is being forced out of his 30-year job as a diamond jewelry wholesaler and is coerced into training his replacement, callow youth Bobby (Donnie Wahlberg) and introducing him to the customers on his central Pennsylvania sales route (this may be the only time you will hear Shippensburg mentioned in a motion picture; I may as well mention that those of us familiar with central Pennsylvania will get a whole different level of amusement from this film).  Eddie imparts gravitas to Bobby along with low-key sales lessons that temper the high-pressure tactics the younger man relies on, and Bobby gets the older man to loosen up and have some fun (a tall order given his impending unemployment and the death of his wife less than a year before).

Poor Donnie.  For a brief moment, he was the famous Wahlberg (the "bad boy" in New Kids on the Block, for those of you below -- or above -- a certain age), and Mark was known as his little brother.  Now he's the one playing catch-up -- and surprisingly, he's doing a credible job.  I was prepared to sneer, but he's pretty good as the brash, slick Bobby (his first appearance is in a tricked-out, flaming-orange dragster called "Lil' Venom" -- given the oft-invoked theory about flashy cars being compensation for, uh, shortcomings in other areas, I don't know why a man would name his car "lil'" anything).  Robert Forster is always terrific, and he's great as the older, wiser Eddie.  The two have great chemistry -- better, in fact, than the chemistry either of them have with any of the women in the movie.

Writer-director Dan Cohen, according to the IMDB, graduated from Franklin & Marshall College (as did my father and my friend Amy), which would explain the otherwise baffling decision to set a movie that doesn't involve Amish people or weather-prognosticating groundhogs in central Pennsylvania.  One of the good lines is Wahlberg's explanation of why the women in the small towns on the sales route are so easy: "The girls in these shitholes don't have anything better to do.  It's not like they're in Harrisburg."

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