Directrospective: THE BEACH (2000)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Leonardo DiCaprio as adventurous young man Richard, for whom the whole world is a game to be beaten.
Danny Boyle’s second post-TRAINSPOTTING outing was another misfire, though much less disastrous than A LIFE LESS ORDINARY. While rejected by critics, thirst for its white-hot leading man - promised by the marketing to be thoroughly shirtless - carried THE BEACH past $100 million worldwide. The cultural position it occupies 20 years later is mostly that of a post-TITANIC curio.
It’s also a transitional film in the Boyle canon. His frequent screenwriter John Hodge adapted it from a well-regarded novel by Alex Garland, who would go on from here to become Boyle’s other most prominent screenwriting collaborator. It marks the end, at least as of this writing, of his films about young hot people doing drugs and crimes while electronic music thuds along. Some ugly business that ended with original star Ewan McGregor replaced by TITANIC mega-cutie Leonardo DiCaprio soured Boyle’s working relationship with McGregor for decades, although they have since made up (see my notes on T2 TRAINSPOTTING next week) and both men have publicly expressed regret over how they handled the split. Its relative artistic disappointment, which Boyle openly acknowledges, also encouraged him to reverse course from the bigger and grander trajectory he’d been on since 1996. Following THE BEACH, he would return to his TV roots, collaborating with playwright Jim Cartwright on two much smaller English slice-of-life films for the BBC, STRUMPET and VACUUMING COMPLETELY NUDE IN PARADISE, and with the television films’ cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle would begin experimenting with the digital video they’d employ on 28 DAYS LATER. Mantle has photographed the bulk of Boyle’s films to date and is as responsible for the look of “a Danny Boyle film” as Brian Tufano.
While they have thus far only worked together on THE BEACH, Darius Khondji’s cinematography fits in well enough with usual Boylean visual whiz-bang, and the film looks decent. There’s an odd dullness to its tropical colors that I assume is due to general studio disinterest as far as restorations for home video go; it’s never had a Blu-ray release, and the technically HD version available to stream looks half-assed. But then the movie itself invites disinterest.
The story follows young backpacker Richard, British in the novel but American here to accommodate DiCaprio, who while looking for escape and adventure in Thailand finds a map to a secret island beach. The paradisaical beauty of that beach appears to have driven the map’s owner Daffy (TRAINSPOTTING’s Robert Carlyle) to almost Lovecraftian battiness, though it’s fairly clear he was called Daffy before that. Hooking up with French couple Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen), whom he wants very badly to bone down, and Étienne (Guillaume Canet), whom he hopes will just dematerialize soon and leave him alone with Françoise, Richard makes the long schlep out to the island. Just before the last leg, he meets some American surfer burnouts who mention a fabled island nearby that’s supposed to be home to an enormous weed growing operation, and, unable to resist an opportunity to be liked, he leaves them a copy of the map.
On the island, they discover the fabled pot farm - complete with Kalashnikov-strapped guards - along with Daffy’s sublime beach, where it turns out he’d lived with two dozen mostly white and definitely not Thai Burning Man types in a self-sufficient commune. The leader, Sal (Tilda Swinton), says they have an agreement with the farmers about secrecy, and the three can stay as long as they haven’t told anyone else about the island. Gulp!
Richard lies, of course, and they all live in tropical bliss until things quickly fall apart expressly because of him. He has rapturous underwater sex with Françoise, who leaves Étienne for him even though they’re two of only a handful of people on the island, and then at the very first opportunity cheats on Françoise with Sal, for whom he’d never even shown much attraction. It comes out that he copied the map, too, and Sal puts him on permanent surfer-watch in exchange for not telling Françoise what a dog he is. Alone on a jungle cliff, he immediately loses his mind and hallucinates, in a now infamous clip, that he’s the protagonist of a Crash Bandicoot-esque video game, charging confidently toward the camera with a pixelated schmucky grin on his face. By the end of the film everything has fallen apart as you’d imagine it would, people have died, paradise is lost.
The film’s great failing, I think, is that it doesn’t fully lean into Crash BandiCaprio. The Boylean moral of the story is that no paradise can really last, but it looked like it was going just fine until this young white man came barrelling into the jungle without even looking where he’s going or back at the destruction he’s caused. His whole young man’s adventure endeavor, the self-actualization imperialism and the sex-as-conquest and the refusal to apologize for having a good time, betrays the guiding ideology of men of his (and, once and I pray never again, my) kind: that the world and all the people in it are components of a game to be won by him, with as close to 100% completion as he can manage. Even when confronted about his behavior by his commune neighbors and a pot farmer with a gun, he rejects the idea that he should suffer any consequences for having fucked things up for everybody else. Shouldn’t losing this level be punishment enough?
Richard’s condemnable selfishness is all there onscreen, but his is the voice we hear explaining that all good things must end, and it’s unlike Boyle to have characters tell us one thing and mean another. He’s obnoxious and weaselly, but it’s still LEO IN SWIMTRUNKS: THE MOVIE. Spielberg would go on to weaponize both DiCaprio’s heartthrob charm and his whiny crybaby streak two years later in CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, inviting us first to indulge in and then to grow exhausted by Frank Abagnale’s compulsive deceit. Here we’re exhausted, but Richard isn’t. Françoise’s wistful email with a picture from better times on the island suggests that she’s forgiven Richard enough to miss the times they had together; if we’re supposed to forgive him, too, neither he nor the film has earned it.