Leo's Spring Break. - Review - movie review

National Review, March 6, 2000 by John Simon

SUPPOSEDLY about "escape from the digital world," The Beach is less a film than a computer game by and for drugged-out teenagers. (If, as he said he will; Gene Shalit steals this line, remember it originated here.) Plot, characterization, and dialogue are all perfectly juvenile and no less improbable. But this marks Leonardo DiCaprio's long-awaited post-Titanic debut, and so guarantees a panting teenage audience, drugged-out or not. Based on a best-selling novel by Alex Garland, the film reunites the director and scenarist of Trainspotting, Danny Boyle and John Hodge.

Richard (DiCaprio) is a young man apparently fleeing our civilization, which is all we are given by way of his history, motivation, and characterization. We meet him checking into a cheap hotel in Bangkok, where cheap hotels truly live up to that designation. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by an absurd shouted monologue from the corridor, which no one interrupts. Soon the shouter (Robert Carlyle), now in the adjoining room, tears a hole in the mosquito netting that is the upper part of the dividing wall. After a few rudenesses, the middle-aged freak, who calls himself Daffy Duck, proceeds to share a king-sized joint with Richard, and reveals himself a returnee from a small, secret paradisiac island that cannot be found without a map on his person.

Next morning, Richard discovers Daffy dead in his room, his wrists slashed. There is enough blood everywhere for a herd of cattle to have been sloppily slaughtered there--the movie does nothing by halves. But Daffy has left Richard his precious map, and, joined by a pair of young French lovers, Etienne and Francoise, Richard sets out for paradise. This turns out to be a crescent-shaped island, inviting and fully visible from a neighboring larger one, possibly even from the mainland. It proves accessible by swimming to our plucky trio, and makes you wonder why a map was required, granted that Etienne thinks he spotted an ominous fin in the waters.

On the island, the threesome runs into a ferocious bunch of heavily armed natives, whom, however, they manage to elude. These ignoble savages, it turns out later, are led by a dope farmer who tolerates the present commune of some 30 or 40 Western hippies, but will hunt down any new arrivals. Otherwise, the island is Edenic, with marijuana growing all over, lushly wooded hills, and a scenic waterfall cascading into a crystalline lagoon full of fish ready for the spearing. On a high ledge above, the boys hesitate, but when Francoise jauntily dives in, they cannot but follow.

Soon they are amid the commune of fellow escapees from digital (or any other) civilization, who pass their time blissfully dancing on the pristine beach, strumming guitars, or playing such games as repeating a silly phrase set by a Croatian hippie in his native tongue. The commune, you see, is multinational, which would suggest many maps circulating around the world. There is, though, not much sex on view, and what there is is mostly toned down to the age level of your typical DiCaprio fan.

The commune is governed by Sal, played by the frightening Tilda Swinton, who has the ghostly coloring of a Weimaraner, and the icy stare of a sadistic English scoutmistress. In due time, Richard fights a heroic battle against a harmless-looking baby shark, is seduced by the adorable Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) without too much opposition from the less toothsome, somewhat scruffy-looking Etienne (Guillaume Canet), and catches the coldly lustful eye of Sal.

The happy colony is well supplied with all amenities because a couple of them periodically sail to the mainland to purchase whatever, from tampons to cigarettes, is needed in paradise, without arousing the mainlanders' suspicions. Conversely, when someone badly needs medical help, he is not allowed to seek the mainland, lest the island become overrun by non-mapholders. So an occasional island death from illness or shark bite is conveniently overlooked by the rest.

But trouble begins when Sal takes Richard along on the mainland shopping tour and promptly gets him to service her. Later, Francoise mysteriously finds out and, in a very bourgeois dudgeon, dumps him. Forthwith, things go bad for everybody, as inferior mainland hippies to whom Richard gave the map invade paradise, the dope chief decides to exterminate all whites, and so, unamiably, on. There is, nevertheless, a happy ending as Richard, back in civilization, is reunited with a computer on which he receives an e-mail message from his admittedly absent Francoise that heartens him with an allusion to the parallel universes about which they discoursed in the rosy past. Fortified, he returns to his computer game.

DiCaprio has evolved a more mature head and more muscular physique, but whether that increases his charm remains for the box office to determine. Virginie Ledoyen is as lovable in English as she was in French, but loses something in the transition from] girl to woman. To make paradise more photogenic, the filmmakers had to import 100 coconut palms and flatten out some obtrusive dunes, but they are no flatter, I'm sure, than the rest of this shallow movie.