Bell Diamond begins with one of the low-budget technical flourishes that director Jon Jost often employs in his films. The protagonist, Jeff (Marshall Gaddis), is seen in close-up, gnawing on a piece of gum and drinking beer, while the sound of a televised baseball game is heard on the soundtrack. Over the course of several minutes, the shot slowly dissolves to the ball game itself, seen on the television screen. The sequence reveals much about Jeff's character. Sad-eyed and hangdog, but brimming with nervous energy, he looks like a man about to crack. Bell Diamond is one of Jost's more subtle films. It moves at the slow pace of life in the drab, working-class town where it is set, and is built out of long takes (many of them quite beautiful) that create a dialectic between the characters' pained emotional lives and the ruined industrial landscape that surrounds them. Jeff's troubled relationship with his wife is the film's central story, but its core is the emotional despair that the Vietnam War inflicted on Jeff and his group of friends. Their attempts to console him dredge up the devastation they all suffered in the war, and that lies at the root of Jeff's problems. Jost has made a career out of turning the limitations of his low budgets into virtues. Bell Diamond's stripped-down aesthetic is perfectly in keeping with the story it tells, and the actors (many of them non-professionals) give performances that are all the more powerful for being rooted in actual experience.
by Tom Vick
review
