Is The Beach a sign of the times? Mark Mordue argues that it is part of a hip new wave of technologically over-stimulated cinema taking us all down a blind alley with its stars.

Drowning by Numbers: The Beach
Review by Mark Mordue
Archived Reviews

Directed by Danny Boyle, Written by John Hodge & Alex Garland--based on the novel by Alex Garland; Running time: 119 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Leonardo di Caprio (Richard), Virginie Ledoyen (Françoise), Tilda Swinton (Sal), Guillaume Canet (Étienne), Robert Carlyle  (Daffy)

Is it possible for one film to sink an artist's career? Because The
Beach may do that for Leonardo di Caprio - almost as assuredly as
Titanic made him an icon. No doubt there'll be some puns on both those
titles and the distance a great young actor swam from a Hollywood
ocean liner to psuedo-hip quicksand.

In a word, The Beach stinks. As if all the celluloid expended on it
were so much rotting seaweed gathering up around the legs of its star.

It looks good, of course. You'd expect that much at least from the
Scottish film team - director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew McDonald
and screenwriter John Hodge - who made Shallow Grave, Trainspotting
and A Life Less Ordinary. Here though, their visual strengths are now
their weakness: a castle built on... sand.

The Beach is all incoherent sheen and advertorial jazz, the kind of
hyped meta-cinema we are now seeing more of as directors lacking a
decent script, let alone anything to say, turn to the medium's molten
involvement with technology to scribble and blam their raygun style
outta trouble.

This new cinematic energy has been gathering momentum for some time
now. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers remains a benchmark. Others
might choose the grainy video shivers of Atom Egoyan's first film
Family Viewing, David Lynch and David Cronenburg's grotesquerie, Peter
Greenaway's monolithic intellectual mosaics, or even the narrative
vocabulary of Tarantino (who is really a classicist at heart) to
discuss its evolution. A recent German film like Run Lola Run also
springs to mind. Of course there's Trainspotting itself.

In their recidivist and puritanical way, the Dogma school is a part of
this by choosing to stand apart from it. Their restricting manifesto
is most obviously symbolized by the Danish director Lars Von Trier in
The Idiots (use of a handheld camera, no added soundtrack, no special
effects) who seems to have seen these 'new' dangers coming and
disowned his own seduction by technology in an early film like
Zentropa. The reactionary premise behind the Dogma aesthetic is that
film has lost control of itself, that Hollywood as a medium is
capitalism drunk on its own surfaces, materialism gone mad. Their
solution is to reject it all. To go back to basics.

Others, of course, have headed in completely the opposite direction.
As fast as they can.

What defines this technologically juiced-up cinema and its attractions
are complex. Developments in digital and animation technology in
conjunction with the influence of video games, rock videos and rapid
fire editing are obvious influences. Powered perhaps by a millennial
excitement for the new, the myth of progress as a scientifically
accelerated act. You could also argue this 'vision' is the cultural
side of what people keep calling globalization, as the influence of
everything from Japanese manga cartoons to net porn, Ecstasy drug use,
the graphic delusions of dance culture and a trashy, voyeuristic taste
for reality TV and surveillance all converge.

Whatever the drives, a metacinema is taking shape, sometimes with a
purpose, sometimes to overexcite the eye where the mind and heart of a
viewer would otherwise wilt completely. David Fincher seemed to get
away with this recently in The Fight Club. Style over content marketed
as satire. The popcorn crowd swallowed it.

Will Danny Boyle, who directed The Beach, be so lucky? Is Leonardo's
di Caprio's marquee value enough to pull audience investment, if not
artistic faith in the project, over the line? Only the box office will
tell. But the critics are already having a field day taking it too
pieces.

Right from the start you know there's trouble brewing. The electricity
of the film is just too... too pushed. It's in a hurry to make an
impression, like someone acting overbearingly cool. And oh so aware of
its own soundtrack.

Leonardo di Caprio plays Richard, an American fresh to Bangkok,
sneer-cruising the streets, part ingenue, part rebel without a cause.
A typical young male touring Asia, bored and boorish. As he prowls
into this world, his name and that of the other lead actors are
vibrated onto the screen in handwritten scratchy neon. Di Caprio does
a voiceover lifted directly from The Book that spawned The Film. The
feel of the voiceover is undergraduate Bladerunner, tough talk from a
philosophical jerk wandering an Asian city of the night. In the Alex
Garland novel this kind of aggressive naiveté was a shaky premise for
an anti-hero; in the film it's a disaster all the way.

Richard quickly takes up a street dare, and ends up in a drinking game
with gangsters by an aquarium of snakes, one of the film's many two
dimensional and insulting portraits of local Thai people. It must be
said, however, that there is not a single figure in the film -
including Leonardo di Caprio - whoever rises above the wooden and the
caricatured. In that sense, there is a complete absence of human
depth, or character on any level.

After the gangsters and snakes, Richard moves off to an insect ridden
hotel populated by a drunken maniac and a beautiful French girl. By
the time Daffy (Robert Carlyle) is kicking walls and singing and
shouting, and Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) is opening Richard's hotel
door, you are thinking there might be some hope in this film after
all. Backpackers watching Apocalypse Now in a beer garden, an old Thai
lady mopping electrical wires, and a few other hotel eccentricities
all strike an honest note. If only the story could have stayed in
Bangkok and sustained itself like this. But that is not to be.

Carlyle's performance as Daffy quickly descends into a Marlon Brando
meets Dennis Hopper parody, the holy fool with heavy eye makeup and a
giant spliff on hand. Maybe Carlyle or director Danny Boyle thought he
was still the villain in the James Bond flick he took time out from to
make it for The Beach. He gives an addled speech to Richard and passes
on a map with directions to an island utopia far from the commercial
backpacking trail.

Of course Richard decides to find that island paradise. He invites the
beautiful door-opening French babe, Francoise (Ledoyen), and her
French boyfriend Etienne (Guilame Canet), to accompany him on the
adventure. They act like ordinary tourists, then swim shark infested
waters and cross a Thai gang-patrolled marijuana plantation before
coming upon one last obstacle - a giant waterfall that doesn't look as
dramatically big as we're supposed to imagine it. Anyway, they jump.
Eventually they find their Shangri La, but the ideal community has
trouble festering beneath the surface - and Richard has a lot to do
with bringing it up to boil.

Tilda Swinton plays is the community's leader, a Machievellian bitch
who all but rides a broomstick when she isn't giving young Richard a
going over in the boudoir. Why anybody would want to spend time on an
island with this mindgame queen, her absurdly jealous boyfriend and
her droogy consorts remains a mystery throughout the film.

By the climax of it all Richard is hallucinating in the jungle, which
Boyle presents as a Gameboy version of Apocalypse Now. It's about as
animated as di Caprio gets in the entire film. And it shows a rare
flash of visual wit. A few people then get killed, before everybody
else floats off on a raft to escape the island.

In the last scene di Caprio is looking at happy snaps of those island
days sent to him via email at cyber café. This is supposed to pass the
film off finally as a commentary on alienation and modern technology.
It is in fact bad comedy, yet another dollop of trendy modernity
pasted over this most hollow of films.

Most people know the background to The Beach. A best-selling 1996
debut novel by Alex Garland, Britain's hottest young writer, it has
been marketed to a new generation of backpackers: a wave of young
tourists with money and techno music tapes proliferating across the
globe. As a book, The Beach is intended as a moral satire on this
colonizing wave, albeit done in an overdrawn, immature hand. Among
other things, Garland admitted to me that he was unhappy with the way
he portrayed Thai people "like palm trees". It is a first book with
all the faults that entails. He has since published The Tesseract, a
far superior and controlled novel, though less of a niche marketer's
zeitgeist wet dream.

In mostly keeping true to the book, director Danny Boyle and
scriptwriter John Hodge have brought in all the weaknesses so apparent
in the writing. Notably the very boring appearances of the 'ideal
life' on this island paradise; the comical, overblown absurdity of
Richard's Apocalypse Now fantasies; and the glibness of the
characterizations. Worst of all they have also recreated all of the
unlikeability of Richard, the main character. He is, simply, an
immature idiot.

With such a prestigious and hip stream of films behind them, Danny
Boyle and company know they can sell The Beach to audiences in much
the same way Richard is handed a map and a cool idea. But it's a false
paradise on both counts.

In the leadup to making The Beach, the actor Ewan McGregor was openly
hurt that Boyle had chosen Leonardo di Caprio over him to be the star
of the new film. The Scots had come a long way together as a team
since making Shallow Grave. McGregor felt betrayed, but he was lucky
and his revenge is oddly sweet. In order to fit Leonardo di Caprio
into the role, the character of Richard was therefore changed from
being an Englishman to an American - and maybe, just maybe, there's a
loss of sarcasm and msinathropy in that decision. A loss of the
internal irony that may have better suited McGregor's persona and
British style of acting, and perhaps have saved the film. But that's
doubtful.

Certainly Leonardo di Caprio must have been very depressed to see this
mess up on the screen. After William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet and
Titanic, no matter how much he tries to reconstruct himself as a free
spirit, he can no longer succeed or fail as a mere actor. He is now a
symbol of the time. The successor to James Dean and River Phoenix's
mantle. But not even they could have saved The Beach. So perhaps we
shouldn't blame him, or say his time is over just yet. Instead we
should ask, is the newly minted film medium of the moment in danger of
drowning in its own excess?