Salon.com MobileNo phone, no lights, no motorcar -- not a single luxury! Leonardo DiCaprio and the "Trainspotting" creators can't rescue Alex Garland's trouble-in-paradise bestseller from trite moralizing.
Picture, if you dare, an island community peopled by post-adolescents running around in those long shorts that aren't quite pants and necklaces made out of little shells: The dark side of human nature is indeed terrifying.
But Danny Boyle's "The Beach," based on British novelist Alex Garland's 1997 Utopia-gone-wrong bestseller, doesn't stop there. On this particular island, with no phones, no lights, no motorcars, citizens catch their own fish for food and laze around or play volleyball the rest of the time. A Gordon Lightfoot-gone-native troubadour makes music for them on his battered acoustic guitar. They wear clothing made of cotton and other natural fibers, yet all of them have forgotten what an iron looks like. They're living as God intended, and we're the ones made to suffer for it.
The message of "The Beach," both the movie and the book it's based on, is that technology and other stuff you have to plug in have disconnected us from our true natures -- but if we ever have the opportunity to let our freak flags fly, we must be prepared for the dark secrets we might unearth. For anyone who ever read "Lord of the Flies," or even just the Cliffs Notes, that's nothing we haven't heard before.
But there's always the possibility that a good director might elevate lackluster material. Boyle just doesn't rise to the challenge. His "Beach" lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material's tepidness. Instead, he now and then simply jabs electrodes into the movie to try to bring it to life, borrowing some of the quicksilver editing techniques and music-video hyperkinesis he used so beautifully in his brilliant second picture, "Trainspotting," and in the highly underrated "A Life Less Ordinary." "The Beach" lurches along, informed by a kind of forced lyricism -- and even that seems to be driven mostly by all that white sand and blue water, the movie's most resonant images (the handiwork of Darius Khondji, who also shot "City of Lost Children").
Of course, on some level, "The Beach" is nothing more than a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Although he's appeared in two pictures since "Titanic" -- "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Celebrity" -- this is the first role he's taken since superstardom tapped him with its mighty scepter. Not so long ago, DiCaprio was one of the finest and most exciting actors movie audiences could have hoped for, and on the basis of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "This Boy's Life" alone, it will be a long time before I'm ready to give up on him.
But as Richard in "The Beach," he does little more than strut around, pouting and frowning in his Phish wear. His character may not be particularly well written in the first place (the screenplay was adapted by Boyle's longtime collaborator, John Hodge), but all of DiCaprio's natural appeal is submerged here.
