Review: On "The Beach"

"The Beach" is director Danny Boyle's first major movie since the darkly comic and powerful "Trainspotting" a few years back. It's not a happy comparison. "The Beach" is a gorgeous mess, a fantasy/adventure in part about escaping technology. [Warning: I don't give the ending away, but I do discuss the plot] Read more for my review and to post your own.

There were some reasons to expect something special from the much-hyped "The Beach," given Leonardo DiCaprio's success in "Titanic" and Danny Boyle's dazzling "Trainspotting." Lower your expectations.

"The Beach" is a contemporary fantasy, part about living a disconnected, low-tech life. It mixes elements of "Blue Lagoon" with "Lord of the Flies" and "Heart of Darkness." The premise is that Richard (played by DiCaprio) is a somewhat lost American teenage tourist in search of adventure. He gets wind of a deserted island off the Gulf of Thailand, and sets out to find it along with two French kids.

He finds a dazzling paradise, but you probably already sense that the only time Hollywood invokes paradise is to create a paradise lost. Needless to say, this fantasy place -- no electricity, phones, beepers, pagers, computers, Net (there are CD's) can't last long, and trouble lurks behind every gorgeous waterfall.

The word many people are using to describe this movie is "eye-candy," which is a bit unfair. It's a gorgeous film shot in a beautiful place, but primarily, the movie is a vehicle for DiCaprio to be as scantily-clad as possible, and to try and make the point that he's a dark and complex actor. The movie's sub-themes are ambitious -- our common yearning for escape, the things we'll do to preserve our so-called paradise, the desires most of us have for adventure and excitement -- but DiCaprio's oh-gosh wholesomeness and winsome smile isn't up to pulling off so heavy a role.

The movie shamelessly invokes "Lord of The Flies," the dark novel about what kids do to one another when left alone on an island and even more blatantly, pulls from Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" and Joseph Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness." How odd that in such a place, all of the teen refugess assembled happen to be gorgeous.

But DiCaprio is no Marlon Brando, who played Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" (inspired by Conrad's gloomy tale), and Boyle's great skill at invoking the world of lost kids in "Trainspotting" is in direct conflict with beautiful, half-naked boys and girls frolicking in an island paradise. His efforts at foreshadowing trouble and using this star to invoke darker themes fall flat. Still, the movie is cinematically amazing in parts, and when DiCaprio is playing a brave but tentative kid in search of meaning, he's not bad.

This is a movie worth seeing if you keep your expectations very much in check. Boyle is also clearly -- and very subtly -- trying to raise some issues about escape from a hi-tech, continuously communicative and invasive world.

Comments

Re:The Beach should be BOYCOTTED!

[maniac11]

My girlfriend was in Thailand during the production of this film and witnessed the destruction of the beach in "The Beach" firsthand.

It saddens and disheartens me, not only that this type of article gets press on slashdot, but that the press was favorable. It's turning the motto 'Stuff that matters' into a mockery.

Please join me and the above AC in boycotting this ridiculous movie.