Paradise predictable

>> Danny Boyle and Leonardo DiCaprio make The Beach a partial success

by MATTHEW HAYS

There's a certain sense of redemption surrounding The Beach, Danny Boyle's latest film. Not because of its plot, which has to do with an alienated young man who finds what appears to be a secret tropical paradise, but because of the director's track record.

Simply put, the team behind Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, two of the more intriguing films of the past decade, dealt their fans a blow with their last feature, the terrible A Life Less Ordinary. Now screenwriter John Hodge, producer Andrew MacDonald and Boyle have concocted their hugely ambitious, highly anticipated cinematic version of Alex Garland's bestselling eponymous novel. Comparing something to A Life Less Ordinary wouldn't be fair (practically anything would look good), but The Beach manages a decent pace and maintains a solid degree of interest throughout.

Here, Leonardo DiCaprio--in his first turn since helping to raise the Titanic's box office into the stratosphere--plays a disaffected young American hell bent on reaching out and touching something. Paradise lost just might be found when DiCaprio comes across a nutbar (Robert Carlyle) in a Bangkok hotel who describes a fantastical, faraway enclave--and then promptly kills himself. There wouldn't have been much of a novel or movie without a map, so DiCaprio finds one, and he and a French couple (Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen) decide to risk their lives to find where X marks the spot.

The screenplay plays fairly well on urban myths about tropical paradises. After dodging some gun-toting Thai pot farmers, DiCaprio and company find themselves in a gorgeous, remote and unspoiled spot, which looks very much like the stoner version of Club Med. A motley crew of travellers decided to put down roots here; they are sworn to strictest secrecy about its whereabouts. If indeed some environmentalists' complaints about the making of this film are true (that the location shoot caused the destruction of a vital ecosystem) then the irony would be delicious: plotline of people seeking unspoiled oasis matched by major studio destroying unspoiled oasis.

The dilemma with this set-up is, everyone knows where it's headed. It don't take no rocket scientist to figure out that what first appeared to be paradise, almost certainly isn't (in fact, most lower-IQ dogs will probably catch on to this one). While I won't give away the plot's principal twist, it comes as no surprise when the dominoes are triggered and everything starts to fall apart.

In the press kit, the filmmakers complain that Garland's book was "unfairly compared" to Lord of the Flies. What were they expecting? In a film that features breakdowns courtesy of Apocalypse Now, nasty stereotypical natives a la Midnight Express and huts lifted from the Gilligan's Island Preservation Society, it doesn't feel like there's much that's truly revelatory in The Beach. That doesn't mean that there's no palpable tension here, because there is. Nor does it mean that it's as bad as Life Less Ordinary. But the Boyle team never quite conjures up the kind of queasy, nasty doom-around-the-corner aura they managed with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. Maybe next movie. :

The Beach opens Friday, February 11