Every few months,RollingStone.comshines a spotlight on a forgotten, neglected, overshadowed, underappreciated and/or critically maligned film that we love in a series called Be Kind, Rewind. In honor of The Revenant and Leonardo DiCaprios widely predicted Oscar win, were focusing on an older Leo movie thats been unfairly put in the noble failure pile: The Beach.
Its February 2000, a little over two years sinceTitanicplowed directly into the zeitgeist, and the films 25-year-old star is now slightly more famous than the ship of dreams itself. No actor on the planet is more difficult to extricate from the aura of his public image; no other actor brings more baggage to a new part.
Other than a fitting cameo in Woody Allens Celebrity, Danny Boyles The Beach is the first movie that Leonardo DiCaprio has shot since becoming the King of the World. His most loyal subjects expected another A-list victory lap full of sound, fury and CGI set pieces. Instead, Hollywoods hottest heartthrob followed up his role in the biggest blockbuster since Gone With the Wind by playing a generic American backpack brat who buys a one-way trip to Thailand in search of something more beautiful, something more exciting, and something more dangerous. Cue mass Leo-phile confusion.
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Unsurprisingly, people dont loveThe Beach. It stands at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes (for context, thats 27 percentage points lower thanTed 2). It underwhelmed at the domestic box office. It didnt satisfy a legion of confused fans who were sold an edgy update of Blue Lagoon, only to find something that more closely resembled a watered down and warless remake of Apocalypse Now. In the end, the films $50 million domestic haul barely doubled DiCaprios salary.
But hindsight can reveal all sorts of hidden wonders. Whatever part he decided to play after Jack Dawson, DiCaprio knew that viewers werent going to be able to disentangle the character from the actor behind him, and he was perceptive enough to pretend otherwise. Boyle has spoken openly about how consciously he and his leading man manipulated the latters stardom to their advantage. I talked to Leo about this,he toldTime Magazinein an interview published shortly after the movies release. And he felt his options prior to making the movie were either to confirm his standing fromTitanic, dynamite it withAmerican Psycho, or to use what he had and take the audience with him. The latter was, to both our minds, more interesting.
In other words, DiCaprio would essentially be playing himself.
My name is Richard, so what else do you need to know? In any other movie, that opening line of voiceover would sound like a sub-Tarantino provocation, but DiCaprios stardom completely transforms it. Its as if hes declaring: Im the kid from Titanic, you know Im the kid from Titanic, so lets just accept that and move forward. Its the first self-reflexive salvo in a film that takes pains to make sure that you never forget who youre watching. The Beach wants you to see Richard through the lens of the superstar playing him, and vice-versa. The King of the World was casting off his crown.
Shortly after Richard blows into Bangkok, hes visited by a raving lunatic named Daffy (Robert Carlyle), who rambles about looking for the cure for the cure and tells the wide-eyed kid about a secret off-shore utopia.When the man kills himself and bequeaths Richard a hand-drawn map to the islands location, our heros proto-millennial spirit quest is gifted with the perfect destination. And so, with his nubile French neighbor (Virginie Ledoyen as Franoise) and her hapless boyfriend (Guillaume Canet) in tow, he charts a course for heaven on earth.
For its first hour, the film is as intoxicating for us as the idyllic island hideaway is for Richard and his pals. Boyle shoots their journey there in a way that crystallizes their perfect moments of happiness when the kid lies on his back and watches Franoise sally across his view of the night sky, her image blurs across the screen as though its melting directly into Richards memory. Mobys Porcelain, ubiquitous at the time, was made to be draped over a casual montage of the beachs residents hanging out, the songs drifting notes making it sound as though it could go on forever.But Richard has hardly set foot on his new island home before the sand begins to shift beneath his feet, and his desire for Franoise settles into the sky above like a permanent storm cloud.
Happiness, as Don Draper once said, is just a moment before you want more happiness. Richard is reluctant to accept that sentiment, but Sal (Tilda Swinton), the communitys despotic leader, has already rejected it outright. For Sal, happiness is a place on a map, and any threat to its perfect equilibrium must be terminated extreme prejudice. When one of the islands Swedish residents is bitten by a shark, its Sal who shuts down any talk of sending him to the mainland for medical attention. Later, when his leg begins to rot, she insists that he be dragged out of sight so that the party can rage on. Shes trapped on the beach, like Mal in the decrepit bottom dream level ofInception, but this earlier DiCaprio film does a more lucid job of illustrating the danger ofnot abandoning a fantasy long after its started to crumble around you.
Its only a matter of time before Richard succumbs to the same mania, Boyles characteristically maximalist approach applying the skills he honed onTrainspotting and rendering utopia as its own deadly addiction. In the perfect beach resort, Richard reflects, nothing is allowed to interrupt the pursuit of pleasure, not even dying.
Chronicled in a notoriously insane third act, his downward spiral from uninvited tourist to sociopathic jungle creature happens slowly and then all at once. Confronted by the grim reality of paradise, Richard tries to burrow even deeper down into fantasy, disassociating himself so completely that he begins to picture his life as a videogame. Its not until he indirectly causes the deaths of the kids that he was trying to scare off that Richard realizes that hes suddenly been recast as Colonel Kurtz.
As is often the case for Americans who travel abroad, someinnocent strangers had to die so that Richard could learn a crucial life lesson for himself: The moment you start to love something is the moment you start to lose it, and if you dont adjust for that, its only a matter of time before you lose yourself. In the wake of Titanic, it would have been so easy for DiCaprio to coast for the rest of his career, but watchingThe Beach, you can understand why he didnt anchor himself tothe Star Wars prequelswhy he partnered with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg instead. Watching this nirvana-as-a-form-of-madness parable, you can understand hownomadic cherub Jack Dawson is about to win an Oscar for a nearly wordless performance in which he sleeps inside the guts of a dead horse.Titanicmade Leonardo DiCaprio a sensation. The Beach that proved he was a movie star.
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