Beach [Old Version]

---

Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »

---

I don't know where studios get scripts like "The Beach" or why they decide to film them. This one may have washed ashore in a bottle. Surely, a better screenplay could have been made from Alex Garland's book. Anyway, the movie stars the ever-popular heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to have an affinity for water. Maybe the studio bosses thought he looked good with his shirt off. "The Beach" is a cross between "The Blue Lagoon" and "Lord of the Flies," with a whole lot less going on than meets the eye.

DiCaprio plays Richard Fischer, a fellow looking for something different and unusual to spice up his mundane life. Apparently, he's never heard of the "fight club." He doesn't want to be one of the crowd; he roams the world but disdains tourists. He winds up in Bangkok, where in a cheap hotel he meets a wacko (Robert Carlyle) who tells him about a perfect, secluded island and an idealistic group of people living on it. The next day Richard finds a map pinned to his door and the guy a suicide in the next room.

To Richard the story of the island and the map sound too good to be true, seeming at first like an urban myth. Supposedly, there's a pristine beach far from civilization, with pot growing for miles in a hidden utopia. Richard is skeptical, but he's so bored and so intent on adventure, he'll try anything. Together with a pretty girl, Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and her boyfriend, Etienne (Guillaume Canet), whom he also meets at the hotel, he heads off to the mythical isle. Before he goes, though, he leaves a copy of the map (for reasons unfathomable except to further the plot) with a group of rowdy young travelers.

Once on the island, Richard and his friends do, indeed, find a collection of people living there, all of them having sought out and apparently found paradise, all of them conveniently youthful and beautiful and led by a gal named Sal (Tilda Swinton). It's unclear whether Sal is an elected leader or a self-appointed dictator, but in any event she is one bossy, heartless lady who propagates much of the trouble in the place. Yes, even paradise has its problems, as Richard soon finds out; where humans congregate, it appears, human nature will have its way. Jealousy, desire, lack of medical expertise, and the general clamor of the outside world all rear their ugly heads.

Somewhere in this tale there is supposed to be a moral. Unfortunately, whatever it is, it gets lost in a lot of pompous talk about personal liberty and parallel lives and then some convoluted conflict with barbaric Thai farmers. If I were from Thailand, I'd sue.

---

---