There was always going to be a lot riding on The Beach. Would the Trainspotting trio manage to wipe off the egg that had been left on their faces after A Life Less Ordinary? And could Leonardo DiCaprio live up to the expectations placed on him after Titanic made him the world's most bankable star? Returning to an earlier, successful formula, Danny Boyle and his collaborators - producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge - have adapted Andrew Garland's cult best-seller with their customary style and flair. They've even kept the same basic structure: a male lead narrator in a tale of adventure-turned-sour.
Having usurped Ewan McGregor in the Trainspotting team's affections, it fell to DiCaprio to play Richard, an American on the rave trail in Thailand who stumbles across a map to a perfect, remote beach where a group of travellers have set up their own community. The cynical move of adapting Richard's nationality (from British) to incorporate Leo's box-office clout has proved relatively successful in terms of this film. Leo fits in perfectly with the vapid smugness of The Beach.
It's not all bad. Visually stunning, The Beach has plenty of imaginative stylistic touches: Richard and Francoise (Viriginie Ledoyen) larking around with a camera aimed at stars in the night sky or Richard acting out his hallucinogenic Apocalypse Now fantasies as if in a video game. But there are also moments of extreme laziness. A shot of Leo swimming underwater could be interchanged with the one of McGregor in Trainspotting and the watery kiss when Richard gets the girl (Romeo & Juliet, anyone? It's even the same actor!) border on recycling and plagiarism respectively. Added to which, the soundtrack to The Beach is not used half well as in either of the other two, with an overstrung score indicating to us how we should, but sadly don't, feel.
Seductive, supersaturated colours fail to gloss over the drawbacks here. With little characterisation, few themes and a lack of any one convincing emotional journey, we ultimately don't care about these characters. The bleak, apocalyptic ending of the novel has been altered so that all that remains of The Beach is a kind of adventure holiday for the MTV generation, rather than a cautionary tale of a society that turns on itself. Right at the start of the film, Richard says that he's searching for something "more visceral, more real". Watching The Beach, so was I.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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