”The Beach” is an attempt by all the major talents involved to try something new. For the first 10 minutes, the movie slices forward like the prelims of the latest adrenaline splurge at the Extreme Games.
It reaches an early peak when Robert Carlyle — the flesh-and-blood yang to the yin flash of the director, Danny Boyle — pops up as Daffy, a buzz-cut head offering words of wisdom to Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio). Playing to the back row, Mr. Carlyle is so potent a presence that he’s one of the few actors for whom Dolby Digital is wholly unnecessary. Daffy tells Richard about an island paradise not found on any conventional map. And Richard, a young American vacationing in Thailand and looking for something off the beaten path, follows Daffy’s map in search of promise.
Mr. Boyle is as skilled as any filmmaker at polished sleight-of-hand camera business, in lieu of narrative resonance. Mr. DiCaprio wants to stand his image on its head and give the members of his young fan club something to think about as they slip on their retainers and doze off with visions of Leo dancing in their heads. The picture opens with stark black-and-white that blinks into color before you know it: a metaphor for the awakening that Richard will undergo.
”Like every tourist, you want it all… to be safe, just like America,” a Thai street salesman sneers at Richard as he drifts from one noisy, overcrowded bazaar to another. Seconds later, Richard is forcing down several jiggers of snake blood to prove he’s down for new experiences.
Richard lures his next-door neighbors from his hostel (Virginie Ledoyen and Guilluame Canet) into joining him on the trip to the Shangri-La that Daffy told him about. After a boys’ book of adventure journey, they find themselves in the hidden land. (That is, after they slip past acres of apparently wild marijuana that is actually fiercely guarded by drug runners.) There, Richard is knee-deep in pleasure seekers who have established a commune in this hidden land — more sun, willowy babes and lean fellas with six-pack abs than you’ll find in a summer resort layout in the fashion magazine Spoon.
Maybe ”Shallow Grave,” a gleeful and malicious piece of genre legerdemain, was an appropriate first feature from ”The Beach” production team: Mr. Boyle, the writer John Hodge and the producer Andrew MacDonald. They’re best served when riffing on genres, dispensing a superficial gleam that is cool to the touch. Their crowning, and crowing, work, a glib adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s facile scab ”Trainspotting,” contradicted the heroin-pallor of the source material; it burned with a red-eyed eight-ball rush.
With the exception of perhaps John Woo, no director is better at exploiting interiors than Mr. Boyle. In ”Shallow Grave,” the apartment that was the center of most of the action was as much a character as any actor in the film. And if mottled walls could talk, they would chatter like ”Trainspotting.” His camera slithered through every nook and cranny to find just the right peculiar point of view.
The camera work in ”The Beach” is just as industrious. (Oddly enough, the wide open spaces and big, blue skies confound him a bit here, as they did in ”A Life Less Ordinary.”) Mr. Boyle and his squad are also gifted at shifts in tone, slipping from cheeky to dread in the same shot, like a gentle freshet with a pearly froth that pours into an ominous waterfall. The camera sidles up to a monkey sitting in a tree, then closes in on the tether on its neck: it’s a watch-primate in service of the weed guards, and what was innocent is transformed into danger.
Mr. Boyle and his collaborators are superb at creating surface tension, and Alex Garland’s novel is all surfaces, one fever dream mostly about Vietnam bleeding into the next. The book is a fervid stoner’s reverie about introducing an outside element into a thriving organism, and how that element becomes an infection that leads to the deterioration of a healthy organism — the absurdity of good intentions.
But the movie is simply a Colors by Benetton take on ”Lord of the Flies,” with the imperious paradise ruler (Tilda Swinton, whom the movie could use a lot more of) holding court as the Promised Land crashes around her. Richard finds himself living the aphorism that has ruined the life of so many film protagonists: paradise breeds callousness, a marginal rethinking of beware of the things you want, for you shall have them.
”The Beach” is not a terrible movie, just an insubstantial one. All of Mr. DiCaprio’s charisma and the director’s savvy are used to divert us from the fact that there’s not much going on. The picture is a cocoon around Mr. DiCaprio. Nothing makes that more evident than the bumping, nonstop underscore, a great soundtrack, the kind of music that you would hear at Moomba or Balthazar or someplace else in Manhattan where Mr. DiCaprio would be sequestered from harm behind a velvet rope. He shows some talent: when he tries to seduce Ms. Ledoyen with rambling collegiate pomposity, it is clear he’s willing to undermine his idol status and lampoon cockiness. (He has a lanky, likable intensity — earnestness with a sense of humor.)
As undifferentiated as Mr. DiCaprio is, almost everyone else in the movie is more indistinct, with the exception of Mr. Carlyle with his ”World Is Not Enough” haircut, Ms. Swinton and the vibrant young actor Paterson Joseph (as Keaty, a British Empire sports junkie), who establishes an immediate connection with the audience. ”The Beach” is underwritten, so much so that it is mostly texture, like a scene that parodies love-on-the-beach sequences and then goes them one better: Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Ledoyen kiss underwater, aglow from the iridescent plankton that surrounds them. The visual scheme, abetted by the cinematographer, Darius Khondji, is the most distinguished member of the cast.
The unstated theme of Mr. Boyle and Mr. Hodge’s protagonists — well, maybe it’s not so unstated, after all — is that they’re looking for something new, until they come to realize what they left behind isn’t so soul-deadening after all. Along those lines, ”The Beach,” as the old joke goes, is priceless. It isn’t worth anything.
The Beach (2000)
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, Daniel York, Robert Carlyle, Somboon Phutaroth, Patcharawan Patarakijjanon, Peter Youngblood Hills
Screenplay by: John Hodge
Production Design by: Andrew McAlpine
Cinematography by: Darius Khondji
Film Editing by: Masahiro Hirakubo
Costume Design by: Rachael Fleming
Set Decoration by: Anna Pinnock
Art Direction by: Ricky Eyres, Suchartanun ‘Kai’ Kuladee, Rod McLean, Ben Scott
Music by: Angelo Badalamenti, John Cale, Brian Eno
MPAA Rating: R for violence, some strong sexuality, language and drug content.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: February 11, 2000
Visits: 106
