The Beach

by Peter Keough

After the multi-billion-dollar success of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio's career could hardly go anywhere but down. Nonetheless, he could have given himself a break by steering clear of this callow and overrated property. Alex Garland's inexplicably acclaimed novel The Beach is a twentysomething Club Med tour of Heart of Darkness by way of Lord of the Flies, and it gains nothing by director Danny Boyle's feeble attempts to jazz it up with Trainspotting-style flash and DiCaprio's glowering, stripling presence. Leonard's Richard is a jaded American pleasure seeker bored with drinking snake blood in Bangkok and despairing of ever doing anything that somebody else hasn't done already. A Scottish psycho named Daffy Duck (it's a tribute to Robert Carlyle that he makes the most of this role despite the generic name) offers him a map to a paradisal island off the coast, and before you can say Bali Hai Richard's off with Étienne (Guillaume Canet) and Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen), a giddy French couple who provide little sexual tension.

Both Boyle and DiCaprio seemed more at home in the sordid, sensory overkill of the mainland tourist traps. On the beach there's not much to do but take in the scenery and sample the native marijuana crop. It's lovely, but there are problems. The castaway society of spoiled Westerners that has lodged there is even more vacuous than Richard, and they share the place with Thai dope farmers with bad facial hair and AK-47s.

As a critique of Generation X amorality, vapid pop culture, and Western exploitativeness, The Beach comes off as unintentional self-parody, especially when it lapses into riffs from Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. For DiCaprio and Boyle both, it's low tide.