When we meet Richard, the U.S.-born narrator-hero of The Beach, he has succumbed to the idea that finding adventure necessitates getting the hell out of his homeland—drinking snake’s blood and sleeping with roaches play pleasantly into his romantic notions of danger. As he roams the steamy streets of Bangkok in search of the next hedonistic-masochistic delight, Richard appears oblivious to the American infiltration of Asian culture ("The Simpsons" episodes on TV, the constant bubblegum music sounding from ghetto blasters, etc.). The Beach is about how we as earthlings can’t escape western civilization, and the futility of trying.
Richard is kept awake one night in his hotel by the sounds of lovemaking (his attractive neighbour, with whom he has become infatuated, is getting some from her boyfriend) and by the Scottish-inflected ravings of Daffy (Robert Carlyle), a mysterious rabble-rouser who tears away at the mesh screen of Richard’s window to offer the tourist drugs and chit-chat. Daffy recounts the pleasures of a beach he once inhabited, part of a sun-bleached mass as yet undefiled by tourists. The following morning, Richard discovers the suicidal storyteller’s corpse along with a hand-drawn map to the secret isle, and he enlists an eager Etienne (Canet) and Francoise (Ledoyen), the couple next door, to join him in retracing Daffy’s path to paradise.
Said mass, it turns out, is guarded by gun-toting farmers fiercely protective of their cannibas crops—so much for smoking pot all day, one of Richard’s loftier ambitions. The ensuing chase climaxes with the three travelers coming to the edge of a cliff and diving off, into a blue lagoon—the entrance to the world of their dreams. Out of harm’s way, they discover a group of European expats living in harmony, officially seduced by the beach’s white resplendence. (These villagers have a deal with the farmers above: no more trespassers, live in peace.)
English Sal (Swinton), the casually appointed matriarch of this microcosm, is cursorily welcoming of Richard and his friends. Plainspoken and bossy, she assigns chores and whatnot to her people that will keep them thriving (Richard proves himself an expert fisherman); Swinton, who gives the film’s most vibrant performance, gets to the ruthless core of Sal quickly—she could be playing a tiger, lording over the forest. We get the feeling that The Beach will build to a confrontation between Richard and Sal, because her eyes are always surveying, with a mixture of lust and venom, his very American power to influence.
Downtime, and there is an awful lot of it, is spent by Richard drinking in the atmosphere (handsomely captured by Seven cinematographer Darius Khondji) and pining for the taken Francoise. And why wouldn’t he? She’s gorgeous—cloning experts would be wise to sample Virginie Ledoyen’s DNA (as well as DiCaprio’s, for that matter). Sadly, there’s no compelling reason for them to stay attracted to one another after an inevitable consummation occurs. They’re not very interesting as individuals—Richard is a stock backpacker and Francoise the adorable French innocent—but as lovers, they’re totally blank pages, stuck with the label of "couple" because relationships based solely on casual sex don’t exist in the foreground of expensive movies.
The Beach is conventional in other respects; it settles down into something vaguely formulaic the same way Boyle’s biggest hit-to-date, Trainspotting, does after a few mindbending mock-hallucinations. There are trippy detours throughout, most memorably when Richard pictures himself in a cheesy videogame (battling a tiger, natch), but for the most part, The Beach treads structural ground that was first laid by "Lord of the Flies" and "The Mosquito Coast". A sequence in which Richard loses his mind could be snipped without recourse, and its omission would mean one less encumbering cliché.
Fortunately, the film’s ideology is separate from the aforementioned jungle dramas (and their screen counterparts). Director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge (adapting a book by twentysomething Alex Garland), and producer Andrew MacDonald, recovering nicely from A Life Less Ordinary, have decided that utopia and the western world need not, or cannot, be mutually exclusive. It is understood, when Richard and Sal travel to the mainland for provisions with a grocery list of personal requests from the islanders (for toothbrushes, dish gloves, Game Boys, etc.), that we survivors of the twentieth century are too dependent on stuff, i.e. the comforts of home, to enjoy "paradise" as only nature intended.
And while it is Richard who throws the beach’s societal balance out of whack, by dumbly holding the door open for dopehead tourists, the filmmakers don’t turn his arrival at Fort Sal into an Ugly American scenario. Instead, Richard is an invigorating presence to those denizens in need of reminding why this secluded lifestyle is the cat’s meow. (The character is too inoffensively drawn, but also competently portrayed by DiCaprio.) The Beach’s most insightful moment is a single shot of our green planet as made up of microchips. United by technology, our globe is shrinking; the tech revolution may seem suffocating, but its oft-forgotten goal is to liberate the human being from feeling anything but free.
Leonardo DiCaprio is electrifying (David Sheehan,, CBS-TV) in this adrenaline-drenched, tantalizingly seductive thriller from the director of Trainspo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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