Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Review: The Beach (2000)

The Beach (2000)

Rated R for violence, some strong sexuality, language and drug content

Score: 2 out of 5

The Beach is a failure of a movie, but it is an interesting one, if only for what it didn't mean to say. Directed by Danny Boyle and based off of a novel by Alex Garland (who went on to become a successful filmmaker himself, writing scripts for Boyle before making his directorial debut with Ex Machina), this film boasts some gorgeous cinematography and, for the first hour or so, an intriguing story. It's in the second half or so, when the film switches gears into a thriller, that it starts to turn into a jumbled mess, its protagonist's most unlikable traits coming to the fore and its attempts at commentary never landing or really going anywhere. It's clear that this film was trying to say something about the search for a genuine paradise in the wasteland of modern tourism, but along the way, it got sidetracked into trying to run down many other disparate themes, from environmental destruction to how the "PlayStation generation" remembers the Vietnam War, and it struggles to find the plot afterwards. It winds up a lot like its main character, ironically: searching for something with greater meaning, and leaving with little more than a mixed bag of memories both mesmerizing and frustrating.

Our protagonist, Richard, is a young American man traveling through Thailand hoping to go on a journey of self-discovery, but in Bangkok, all he finds are other Western tourists who had the same idea that he did, catered to by a sleazy local tourist industry eager to part them from their money. That changes when an eccentric Englishman known only as "Daffy" tells him about a mysterious island off the coast where a truly breathtaking experience can be found, leaving him a map to find the place before slitting his wrists during the night. Together with a young French couple named Francoise and Etienne, Richard sets out to find this mysterious island -- and when they get there, they find a community of Westerners who have isolated themselves from the hustle of the outside world, living out their days in paradise and only occasionally trading with the mainland for necessities like rice. Richard takes to it immediately, getting into an affair with the beautiful Francoise in the process. However, when tragedy strikes and the community's leader Sal learns that Richard may have told other tourists on the mainland about the island, things get dark fast, and Richard learns just how far these people are willing to go to protect "their" little slice of paradise from outsiders.

I knew I was in for trouble the moment that this film ran into that problem that seems endemic to film adaptations of novels: the protagonist's internal monologue. So many adaptations seem to have a thing for transcribing the vivid descriptions found on the page directly into the film in the form of using a narrator, instead of weaving all of that stuff into the meat of the film, and The Beach is no exception. Richard constantly narrates the events of the film, often doing little more than describing things that the film is already showing us, or could show us with just a little added effort. (See also: If I Stay.) Fortunately, the direction by Danny Boyle and cinematography by Darius Khondji are enough to keep this movie quite watchable even with Leonardo DiCaprio's disembodied voice constantly interrupting it. The Thai scenery on display (it was filmed on the island of Ko Phi Phi Le in the Strait of Malacca) is absolutely breathtaking, feeling like something out of a documentary commissioned by Thailand's tourism board to lure tourists to their country; when you see it, you can immediately figure out why Richard, Sal, and everybody else on the island is so enamored with it and obsessed with protecting it. All it needed was a Jimmy Buffett soundtrack. The steamy love triangle between Richard, Francoise, and Etienne, which made up the core of the second act of the film, was also fun to watch; even if it was clear that French actress Virginie Ledoyen was not a native English speaker, she still looked captivating and had plenty of chemistry with DiCaprio's Richard, doing her best to sell a badly underwritten character.

The writing, of course, is where things eventually fell apart. While I've never read the novel this was based on, only a synopsis to see where it differed from this film, I do know that it was played as a thriller right from the get-go, with the island presented as too good to be true, and notably lacked the love triangle and had a few more characters, one of whom grows suspicious of Richard. The problem with this film, then, is that when we find out that Sal is not at all a good person, it seemingly comes out of nowhere. The beautiful, utopian tourist paradise we see for the first half of the film is played almost completely straight rather than as having any sort of dark secret, the main source of conflict coming not from Sal and her allies but from Richard and Francoise's affair. As such, I just could not buy Sal as a villain when it was suddenly sprung on me. Tilda Swinton does her best with the role, and mostly pulls it off (because come on, it's Tilda Swinton), but the writing just is not there to support it. Worse, the themes that the film was trying to translate to the screen are lost. The characters, including ultimately Richard himself, commit some heinous actions to keep outsiders away, actions that are portrayed as heinous by the film, yet when all is said and done, things wind up working out for everybody. Whereas the book ended with Richard describing himself as having been emotionally scarred by what had happened, in the film he gets a happy ending, remembering the experience as a "parallel universe" where, for a brief while, he got to cut loose and do something amazing, complete with a happy picture of himself and the friends he made. DiCaprio's talents are wasted, the film focusing largely on his physique while giving him very little to work with in terms of character. It felt as though the meat of the novel was carved out, replaced with sex scenes, beautiful vistas, and shirtless DiCaprio in order to make a film that the studio thought would be more marketable to teenagers.

The Bottom Line

If the novel was meant to be a deconstruction of Gen-X alienation and ennui and the fetishization of "mysterious foreign cultures", then the film is precisely the sort of product that Garland was mocking when writing his book: big, sexy, and boasting spectacular cinematography of exotic landscapes, but ultimately vapid and thoughtless.

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