The Beach
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Warner Bros on June 2, 2000; certificate 12; 118 minutes;
country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Roger Christian; produced by
Elie Samaha, Jonathan D. Crane, John Travolta.
Written by Corey Mandell, J.D. Shapiro; based on the novel
by L. Ron Hubbard.
Photographed by Giles Nuttgens; edited by Robin
Russell.
CAST.....
Barry Pepper..... Johnny Goodboy Tyler
John Travolta..... Terl
Forest Whitaker..... Ker
Richard Tyson..... Robert the Fox
Danny Boyle is one of the most hyperactive boors
in modern cinema, the film director equivalent of someone who'd take your
arthritic father to a rave, forcibly make him dance to the horrible music
and claim to be promoting social integration between the generations. He
takes gritty works of literature, which are filled with reality and truth,
and shakes them up into shallow feature-length pop videos. Obviously he paid
attention in film school, where they teach you conventional Hollywood structures
and cheap tricks that please mass audiences; if only he'd realise you're
supposed to move on after you graduate.
Boyle first trampled on a great book with
"Trainspotting" (1996), a grotesquely lively romp based on Irvine Welsh's
epic study of drug addiction in inner-city Scotland. Now the filmmaker, and
his team of writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald, have brought
us an adaptation of Alex Garland's "The Beach", in which Leonardo
DiCaprio plays Richard, an American backpacker disillusioned by the tacky
Westernisation of foreign culture. He walks through the cities of Thailand
shaking his head at the hustle and bustle of yapping market traders, café
bars full of people watching television, and vulgar drunken
tourists.
In his fleapit hotel, the kid is kept awake by
the sounds of a crazed Scottish pot-head who goes by the pseudonym of Daffy
Duck (Robert Carlyle) and raves about a perfect beach which has so far been
kept secret from these ruinous tourist crowds. He takes a liking to Richard,
though, and gives him a map to this paradise before killing
himself.
Richard and his French travelling companions,
Étienne (Guillaume Canet) and Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen),
do eventually get to the place Daffy promised them, and settle into the beautiful
locale, which is populated by young folks just as sick as they are at the
state of traditional holiday destinations. Their community is rather
sophisticated -- everyone has work assignments, there are group meetings,
huts have been well-built -- and yet more than anywhere else these people
have been, their island offers them the opportunity to absorb parts of the
world that haven't been trodden on. One of them describes it as a "beach
resort for people who can't stand beach resorts".
The dream doesn't last, because inevitably people
do find out about the place, and try to come. This invokes the violent anger
of the dope farmers on the other side of the island -- an added devastation
to the lives of our beach-dwelling friends, who have already begun to destroy
their own peace by developing hostile paranoia about their
privacy.
In his book, Garland found all the right notes
to tell this story; he knew that the experience of paradise found and lost
had to really happen to the reader, so it had some emotional charge
and didn't just become a pretentious cogitation on man's tendency to ruin
the gifts God gave him. His hero was a perceptive, down-to-earth Brit we
could identify with. The beach society was made up of people looking for
clean fun, not a bunch of freaks with some twisted revolutionary ideology.
And their downward spiral emerged gradually, tragically, out of reasonable
concerns that got out of hand.
Boyle and company, however, plunge enthusiastically
into every pitfall possible. The middle passages of their film should settle
into beach life, capture a feeling of tranquillity and make us hope that
it can last; instead, the happy part of the plot is covered in a short montage
where we see snippets of activity and hear DiCaprio's narration tell us how
everything was going fine. Consequently the madness and carnage of the latter
passages come from nowhere and mean nothing. The condensed structure, the
introduction of irrelevant romantic subplots and the brief dialogue make
"The Beach" a film of plot, which is a mistake, since it should be one of
journey.
The production design and photography are impeccable,
and DiCaprio's intense screen presence is always fascinating. Strange, then,
how bland and superficial the film feels; I think it's because Boyle jumps
around instead of absorbing atmosphere, and is working from a screenplay
without any well-defined characters or key moments. The experience of reading
"The Beach" and then seeing the film resembles the plight of the characters
-- they found something wonderful, rejoiced in it, and then saw a bunch of
careless bastards trample it into bloody pulp.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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