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USA/UK 1999, dir. Danny Boyle, stars Leonardo Dicaprio, Tilda Swinton
 Is there anything more depressing
than a film that gets worse as it goes on? The Beach is a classic
example, losing impetus over its three sections until it reaches a terminal
stage of near-unwatchability.
The opening is strong - Leonardo is given a map to a idyllic island from
Robert Carlyle, and sets out with French couple Guillaume Canet and Virginie
Ledoyen to discover it. Danny Boyle's direction is brisk and energetic,
and Darius Khondji's widescreen cinematography hits just the right balance
between grit and glamour. On arrival at the island the pace starts to
slow - which is fair enough, as the characters have left behind the frenetic
pace of the modern world and found an alluring alternative. Tilda Swinton
brings her customary alien gravity to bear in the role of Sal, the impassively
regal leader of a self-sufficient community of ex-travellers and backpackers.
Swinton, who is the best reason to see this movie, somehow contrives never
to condescend to the material, which must have taken a superhuman effort
on her part as proceedings become more and more juvenile around her.
 The main problem is that the pace
continues to slow, and unfortunately coincides with an alarming loss of
focus on the script front. DiCaprio and Ledoyen's flirting soon turns
more serious, and immediately Canet does the decent - and wholly implausible
- thing and hands over his girlfriend to his American rival, who then
proceeds to get it on with Swinton during a provisions trip to the mainland.
This in turn brings to the surface various tensions and conflicts which
escalate during the film's disastrous final section, as DiCaprio is cast
out from the community and undergoes a kind of Apocalypse Now-style
descent into craziness in the jungle. It's during this sequence that the
film basically grinds to a complete halt from which it never quite manages
to recover.
I've now seen this film twice, and I can confirm that the final fifteen
minutes or so make very little sense. The arrival of some more backpackers
on the island causes the local gun-toting marijuana farmers to turn violent
and pull the plug on the community - this much is clear enough - but suddenly
Swinton and DiCaprio end up in a baffling Russian roulette scenario and
then it's all over, apart from a lame coda set in an Internet cafe, involving
the sending of an e-mail. Not exactly what you'd call ending with a bang.
Boyle and company are undoubtedly talented film-makers but The Beach
shows that they need a solid plot on which to hang their abilities. Shallow
Grave remains their best and most focussed work to date, its sharp
coherence sustaining interest in a way which their subsequent output has
so far failed to match. I haven't read Alex Garland's source novel, but
I presume it at least all hangs together - Hodge's numerous changes seem
to have weakened the characterisation and thinned out the story to a fatal
degree.
The Beach is a very calculated package - Leonardo plus the hit
novel plus the right soundtrack plus fantastic settings plus Carlyle's
patented McPsycho and so on - but it's still just a package. It's great
to look at, but that just makes the disappointment so much harder to bear
when we realise that there's nothing inside.
by Neil
Young
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