I watched The Beach on DVD a few days ago. I wasn’t expecting much. I enjoyed the throwaway pleasures of Alex Garland’s novel, but had steered clear of the film – I didn’t think the unmarked Leo DiCaprio was a good pick for limit-pushing backpacker RIchard; Danny Boyle’s ‘A Life Less Ordinary’ was unrelentingly terrible; and the bitterly ironic story that a genuine natural paradise had been wrecked by the production turned me off.
Turns out it’s quite good. The expected nadir, where DiCaprio gurns and cavorts as a live-action Super Mario character while hallucinating the video game around him, is just as ridiculous as I’d been warned, but I wasn’t ready for it to recover from this and deliver a climax that I actually found more genuine and more powerful than the one in the novel.
DiCaprio doesn’t convince as the world-weary backpacker, either, and he plays Richard as a bit of a goofus at all the wrong moments so its hard to see why all the ladies swoon over him, but in general his undoubted charisma carries him through.
The film and novel both dig around in fertile ground, the line between ‘authentic traveller and exploitative tourist. Relatively unexplored in fiction, but urgently at stake in every backpacker hostel you find on the road, where travellers play sincerely-meant status games establishing who is more authentic than who. The truth, of course, is that the traveller culture we have today inevitably changes everything it observes, just as it did when Dr Livingstone went on his journey, only faster and more profoundly. There is a profound moral dilemma in travel at this time on earth, and The Beach is a grotesque exploration of the consequences of ducking out of this dilemma; and the film version is worth a look if any of this resonates with you at all.
2 thoughts on “‘The Beach’ (Danny Boyle, 2000)”
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Yesterday I saw The Sheltering Sky, based on Paul Bowles’ novel. More or less the first line of dialogue establishes the difference between travellers and tourists – tourists start thinking about returning home immediately, while travellers may never come back.
Anyway. Aside from that, holy shit, that was a strange movie.
I often teach a scene from that film (not because I loved the film, more because I had one of those nights where I thought ‘Holy crap – what I am going to teach tomorrow?’ and it happened to be lying around in my flat. So I do the scene where he starts ‘seeing’ Daffy around and is regressing. Makes the kids consciously think about how the director shows that blurring and lighting is used pretty obviously.
Anyhow…. good soundtrack. That nicely segs into my real point, which is that I watched ‘Into the Wild’ last night, which also is about travelling into nature… and also has a nice sound-track. I liked it. Oh, and the lead actor even looked quite like a young Leo or Johnny Depp (all rolled into one, but probably with a little less charisma).
I mustn’t have read the back-cover of the DVD right, because I wasn’t excepting the ending.