Cinema
The Beach (15, selected cinemas
Washed up in Thailand
Mark Steyn
The story so far: last seen bobbing life- lessly in the North Atlantic next to a big iceberg, Leonardo DiCaprio has belatedly washed up in Thailand. He was apparently uncomfortable with the whole teenybopper idol bit, so he bided his time, tossed the proferred scripts in the trash, and waited for one that would challenge him and show the world he wasn't just a Gen X narcissis- tic airhead pretty boy. Eventually The Beach turned up. So now we get to see him stretch himself as Richard, a Gen X narcis- sistic airhead pretty boy backpacking in Bangkok who sets off in search of a fabled lagoon where the pot grows as high as an elephant's eye and the babes are wall to wall. Radical, dude.
Richard hears about this utopian com- mune when he checks into a fleabag hotel, and the fellow in the next room pops his head up over the flimsy partition. It turns out to be a raving Scot (Robert Carlyle), who the following morning commits a rather messy suicide but not before leaving Richard a map showing how to get to par- adise. Eager to get off the beaten track, Richard asks a French bird he fancies (the comely Virginie Ledoyen) and her boyfriend (Guillaume Canet, not uncomely himself) along for the ride. After swimming out to the island and dodging the machine- gun-toting locals who farm the dope, Richard and his Gallic chums find their way to the secret community presided over by Tilda Swinton, who looks like she's just stepped out of an Old Master and runs the group like an old mistress — a Thatcher for the pothead crowd.
At first, you wonder why the rest of the commune don't tell her to chill out, but then you realise it's because the rest of the commune all have non-speaking parts. To get Leo to agree to be in the film, they had to give him $20 million, which doesn't sound like a lot in Hollywood but, as this is essentially a low-budget British venture, works out at half the budget. For that rea- son, they seem to have concluded that any time the camera's not on Leo they're not getting their money's worth. So the rest of the gang just stand around filling out the background: there's a trio of Swedes, an Italian, a black Brit who (in the nearest the film gets to anything so bourgeois as char- acterisation) likes to read the Daily Tele- graph. They came in search of paradise. But will their Bounty crumble away to nothing leaving only chocolate streaks on their shorts and coconut flakes in their belly button? Wanna bet?
The Beach is the latest from the Trainspotting trio, adapted from Alex Gar- land's novel. Sam Goldwyn used to say he'd read part of it all the way through. I've read all of it part of the way through, and, after a casual browse, I'd say Garland was ill-served• by his adaptors. The industry's shorthand for the film is Blue Lagoon- meets-Lord of the Flies, but the finished product fails to do justice to either half of that equation. It comes to something when the soft-core, soft-focus, falling-hair-taped- to-nipples piffle of Brooke Shields actually seems more convincing than gritty, cutting- edge Danny Boyle. But at least when Brooke and whatever the guy's called were on their lagoon they occasionally took their kit off. By contrast, Richard, Frangoise and Etienne have stumbled on the only lagoon in the world where the young hedonists say, hey, it's 90 degrees, there's no one around, we've limited wardrobes and there're no washing-machines, and we're all young and beautiful, but just 'cause we're a long way from home let's not forget the first rule of McDonald's: no shirt, no shoes, no service. Richard has apparently found his way to one of the world's few clothist communes, a refuge from the beaches of St Tropez and Miami and Southend, where the boys and girls are at last free to wear shorts and shirts even when they're swimming.
In fact, for a hedonist paradise, there's a notable lack of hedonism.. Sex is present because a film has to have some, not because anybody seems to want it: Richard lusts for Francoise; Etienne says sure, take her, whatever makes her happy; but then the stern Sal exercises her droit de la seigneuse on Richard; so Frangoise gets cross; so Richard forgets her — you let characters start getting mixed up with each other and it just complicates the whole movie. Tilda Swinton is one of the all-time great sex-scene actresses — the last time I saw her at it was in a fantastically voracious lesbian romp — but her coupling with DiCaprio is like a commercial break, as is Leo's plankton-lit splash with his French cutie. Neither scene has anything to do with character or plot point.
Indeed, the whole film is like a series of sequences in search of a movie. There's a shark fight, a video-game fantasy, a Viet- nam fantasy, all by themselves the kind of `Great! We've got to get that in the pic- ture!' ideas that the execs love at script conference time. But cumulatively they don't add up to a movie: you can't see the beach for the garish towels. The ending is the apotheosis of the film's compilation- album approach: there's a bit of action, which peters out; a touch of weary, passive existentialism, but not too much; and finally a happy ending, because someone in the front office insisted on it.
The best bits of the film aren't the dia- logue or the visuals (when we see the lagoon, it's rather a disappointment after all the build-up), but the odd bits of narra- tion by Leo's character. No film-maker sets out to make an audio-book that happens to have accompanying pictures, and one assumes Boyle and his screenwriter John Hodge put the voiceover stuff in because they looked at the rushes and realised that somewhere, in the transition from page to screen, they'd misplaced the story. About halfway through, one of the Swedes gets savaged by a shark. He doesn't die but he doesn't get better. Instead, he just lies moanin' and a-groanin' in the corner of the dorm all night, until the rest of the gang decide that the whole sickness trip is, like, a bummer, man, and have him moved off into the woods, out of earshot, so he doesn't interfere with their vacuous party- ing. The scene suggests a darker tale, but nothing comes of it, and that's the film in a nutshell: whenever anything vaguely com- plex comes along, they shuffle it off-camera and move on.
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