Watching films under the pretense of a challenge is without a doubt, always the best reason to watch a movie. “Hey, bet you can’t watch Boondock Saints and NOT love it,” someone once told me. Three or four pages of critique later and I had utterly destroyed that challenge, winning a bet if not losing a bit of respect from the person that issued that challenge. It was worth it, obviously.
Such was mostly the case with a little number from way back at the start of the last decade entitled The Beach, a movie impossible to fully understand without a little bit of historical context. For starters, this was (now famous) director Danny Boyle’s third foray into his brand of film, following A Life Less Ordinary, and more memorably Trainspotting. Trainspotting, you may remember, was more or less the Requiem For A Dream of its generation, and enticed a generation of disenfranchised youths to embrace the edgy, British drug culture scene. It wasn’t, like, a great movie or anything, but it was a fine introduction into Boyle’s now characteristic directing style that we’ve seen a few times over between 28 Days Later and 127 Hours and Sunshine, and hell, even Slumdog Millionaire. He takes an idea (usually based on a book), adds a bit of out-of-place and often cheesy sentimentality, and forces you to watch these sudden, flashy, brutal scenes of gritty violence. They style is now ironically known as edgy, and he did indeed help pioneer it. In the case of The Beach, no exception is made to his directing formula.
Actually not too bad a movie, really.
The second bit of historical context you need to know, is that this movie was Leonardo DiCaprio’s direct follow-up to Titanic, which introduced Leo as a Hollywood heart-throb to scores of teenage girls. I wouldn’t want to imply that casting Leo at the height of his popularity with the ladies into a role for which he doesn’t have to wear a shirt for the entire length of the film was done on purpose, willfully and maliciously, but it’s not hard to imagine that it didn’t play some factor.
So, we have a movie, that before you see, you know exactly how it will be directed and purposefully stars a demographic-wrangling teenage-dream who is told specifically to wear as little as possible. One might get the impression that this movie might just be trying to cash in on various hot streaks, but one shouldn’t necessarily always assume the worst.
Truthfully, the idea behind the story isn’t really that bad, and will pique the interest of anyone with even the slightest desire to run away from reality and explore their adventurous side. Should I credit the interesting story to the author who wrote the book that this movie is based on? Probably, yeah, but I didn’t read the book, so legally I can’t. Essentially, though, the story revolves around Richard (DiCaprio), a youth who has decided to go backpacking through Thailand when he gets caught up in a hidden society excluded from reality and living in secret on a paradisaical island. Being that it was based on a book, Boyle decided to include an extreme amount of inner monologue delivered by the main character that’s meant to keep us focused on the fact that he’s still angsty and uncertain of his role in life and/or couldn’t care.
I don't care about my shirt anymore, either.
Which brings me to one of my main problems with the film: the main character. The protagonist of the feature is an angsty, juvenile, apathetic youth who hates what society has become and is looking for a paradise. The subtext in this plain-and-simple coming of age story is almost non-existent, because when you’re 16 and watching this movie the subtext doesn’t matter; you identify with him because his cool attitudes reflect what most suburban teens in America are feeling. Almost every bit of inner monologue is a bit of meaningless psuedo-philosophy that we’re supposed to think deep upon, like most people go on vacation to escape their home, but they end up making the place they vacation to as similar to their home as possible. Yeah, okay then. I guess that’s not so bad, I mean, it wouldn’t be really, if it wasn’t delivered by a yet untalented Leo who reads it in the most pretentious, spoiled rich kid voice he could muster. Really, the acting here is pretty unforgivable. Keep in mind that this is long before DiCaprio joined up with Scorsese and, you know, learned how to act. So what we have here is a half-assed, emotionless jaunt not dissimilar to say, a young Keanu Reeves who has stumbled upon paradise and wants to offer his commentary on it. That’s who we’re supposed to identify with.
And I guess all this would be to be expected, but then inexplicably towards the end of the movie a new theme is introduced, and our protagonist goes through a self-crisis and becomes entirely unrelatable, evolving into a hallucinating, blood-thirsty mess bent on destroying everything in a mindless rampage for absolutely no apparent reason.
I’m not saying that the reason they give is weak or hidden, it’s that in one scene Danny Boyle decides to show Richard prancing through the jungle towards the camera in a bizarre effort to mimic some sort of video game he might have seen once, and after that he’s crazy. Seriously. The character is isolated on a hill for about a week, which I suppose is just enough time to become completely psychotic. You know, I mean, it makes sense as an allegory for struggling with isolation in adolescence and all, but it doesn’t make sense outside of that allegory. It doesn’t make sense when you literally have someone lose their mind from a week of isolation wherein he hallucinates a dead soldier commanding him to kill everyone.
Not gonna lie, it's a pretty weird part of the film that goes on for quite a while.
So, fine, let’s talk about what this movie is trying to do thematically. It’s:
- A coming of age story that works as an allegory for growing up angst-ridden in a middle-class suburban society.
- An attempt to illustrate how any attempt at achieving paradise or true happiness is futile
- A slight against the society they say is invariably one we have to accept
- A feel-good buddy movie that teaches the value of friendship (or something)
Simple enough, really. Richard is sick of society, risks everything on trying to find paradise, finds it, realizes that paradise is made by humans and therefore is imperfect, attempts to destroy paradise, realizes paradise is doomed to fail anyway and destroys itself, Richard goes back home and is fine. Like I said, subtext is pretty useless in a case like this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it just means it’s obvious. For instance, there’s a line in the movie that Richard uses on his French love interest that’s overtly sappy and meaningless, to which the love interest responds “that’s just the kind of line Americans use to try and impress French women” or something to that effect. That’s kind of how the movie is: a script that pretentious and uninvolved filmmakers use to try and impress specific demographics.
Just because I'm part of a large group of people that typically like the same thing and can be easily marketed to doesn't mean I'm part of a demographic!
To be clear though, it doesn’t fail, in this regard, in fact it’s more or less successful. Ignoring a completely useless story arc of Richard going back to the mainland for groceries, the film actually gets you involved, mostly to the credit of the pacing and the more jarring of the story elements. Honestly, Boyle’s particular formula of directing is actually a boon to what would otherwise be a meandering exercise in pandering, giving us just the right amount of excitement and intrigue to keep us vaguely vested in what was happening on screen. FOR INSTANCE, the whole bit with the Swede getting attacked by a shark and the society silently voting for him to be left in the wilderness to die was pretty damn good. It was well handled, unsettling, and generally good film.
Speaking of things that were good about the film, the cinematography was pretty spot-on. Naturally it’s pretty hard to screw up shooting a paradisaical location, but it should be noted that it’s still pretty good, if not at a few points a little over-the-top (a nighttime lagoon sex scene comes to mind).
So what does it all come down to? The Beach, well, it’s not great. It will definitely resonate more with those predisposed to a youthful mentality–those desperately looking for an escape from their life and are generally upset about their condition–as outside of this demographic, the point of the movie seems obvious at best. But if you ask anyone who’s actually, you know, traveled, or been in a number of relationships or lived to any sort of satisfactory degree, I’d assume you’d find them a little less than impressed. It’s still a fine story, and the themes related definitely hold true, they’re just easy themes. Boyle’s directing is trademark and exactly what you’d expect from him, which helps the movie more than it hurts it. The acting is pretty sub-par, with the exception of DiCaprio, who is inexcusably bad. Oh, and the soundtrack is terrible. I don’t mean to sound trivial, but it’s like they just asked some random kid from the test screenings what kind of music they listen to, and the kid made a party-mix and they used it in the movie. I’m actually almost sure this happened.
So yeah: C-
I probably would've rather been watching a documentary on what Bangkok is actually like...
[BONUS FUN FACT! During filming, they decided the beach they were filming on didn’t look heavenly enough, so they bulldozed a bunch of trees and generally altered the landscape to the point that Thailand took them to court for destroying the natural landscape of this island. Lawsuits were unsurprisingly ineffective.]
[ANOTHER BONUS FUN FACT! A friend of mine asked me–since I didn’t approve of DiCaprio’s performance–who I thought should’ve been cast as the lead role. I couldn’t answer at the time, but apparently Danny Boyle wanted Ewan McGregor originally before the studio insisted on DiCaprio, and at that age, that probably would’ve been a fine choice.]
The Glass City 