Leo, Boyle sun burn on 'Beach'

By Erin Podolsky

Daily Arts Writer

Fear not, Leo lovers. I am happy to inform you that not only is the esteemed Mr. DiCaprio dripping wet for a great portion of "The Beach," but that he is also half-naked for a good 118 out of 120 total movie minutes.

Somewhat a modern version of all those island paradise-gone-horribly-wrong tales you had to read in high school - although the Beach-dwellers all appear to be high school graduates, "Lord of the Flies" apparently wasn't in their curriculum. "The Beach" sees Richard (DiCaprio), a slight loner with "well-defined thumbs" that betray the hours of video game playing he's engaged in, arrive in Bangkok with the intention of doing something "different" with his vacation. Different arrives in the form of Daffy (Robert Carlyle), a grime-covered, crazed man who gives Richard a map to the urban legend-esque Beach just before slitting his own wrists.

While any good American citizen traveling abroad would A) not understand Daffy's Scottish brogue; B) worry about smoking the laced-with-god-knows-what pot Daffy's dirty, grubby hand tosses over the wall that separates their rooms; or C) take a cue from Daffy's clearly maniac state and stay as far away from the Beach as possible, Richard is sick of being a good American citizen. Lonely and horny, he recruits a French couple his age staying in a nearby room to seek out the Beach. They're looking for adventure, too, so the trio sets off with enough sexual tension to power a small city.

Along the way Richard makes sure to plant the proverbial first act gun that will reappear in the third as his Achilles heel, making a copy of the map after being expressly told not to do so. He slips the map to a couple of stoners he briefly hangs out with, even though it's painfully obvious that they are the wrong kind of people to be leading to the Beach. Their reemergence late in the film as intruders on the island sets up director Danny Boyle's most unsuccessful experiment. One part Kurtz and one part Willard of "Apocalypse Now" with a smattering of "Super Mario Bros." thrown in for good measure (literally), Richard goes undercover to stop them. In the process, he loses his humanity and, of course, realizes the true evil of the Beach and its inhabitants - the horror, the horror!

Richard fits right in when he arrives at the Beach - suspiciously so. It seems that he is sublimating his own personality in order to better mesh with those around him, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the commune-like atmosphere that the Beach dwellers have created. Shifting between "Lord of the Flies" extremes Ralph and Simon, Richard has the time of his life. "The Beach" has plenty of Ralphs and Simons to go around, but it has a distinct lack of Piggys. Then again, this is Hollywood. The Piggys don't get callbacks.

After wetly freezing to death in "Titanic," it looks like DiCaprio put a stipulation in his contract that he could under no circumstances make another ice watery movie anytime in the near future. He has turned up now in "The Beach," where the weather is always balmy and the water is clear and blue. It's unfortunate that Leo hasn't realized that maybe the key to his movie problems is the water itself - never mind that the stuff covers 70% of the Earth's surface. For DiCaprio, good old H20 is turning out to be acting Kryptonite.

DiCaprio has as little chemistry with his female counterpart (or anybody else in the movie, for that matter) as Boyle's camera does with anything it sees. Boyle and the rest of his crew have been sinking lower and lower with each subsequent film after the creepy "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting," the movie that tacked the chic onto heroin, first with the decidedly mediocre "A Life Less Ordinary" and now "The Beach." Whither Renton? Boyle assigns DiCaprio an opening voiceover monologue along the lines of Ewan McGregor's "Trainspotting" statement of purpose, but poor Leo lacks the cadence and the rhythm to make his own speech anything more than oddly flat. Boyle, and "The Beach" as a whole, suffer the same malady.

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) bask in the sea and look hot in "The Beach."