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Review by Susan Granger
2 stars out of 4
It's a teeny-bopper's fantasy: Utopia with Leonardo
DiCaprio. Let's hope those teenagers who flocked to Titanic are now
old enough to get into this R-rated idyll because they're the target
audience. Leo plays an American backpacker in Thailand, eager to
escape from the touristy, pop culture, digital world of today. Travel,
he says, is the search for experience, the quest for something
different. That's just what he finds when he and a young French couple
(Guillaume Canet, Virginie Ledoyen) follow a map given to him by a
manic, crazed Brit (Robert Carlyle) who commits suicide. To get to
"the perfect beach," they swim across open sea from one island to
another, crawl through cannabis fields past armed guards, and jump
from the top of a 120' waterfall. Exhilarated, they discover a small,
international community of young travelers under the leadership of
ruthless Tilda Swinton, who has vowed to keep their unspoiled hideaway
secret, an exclusive enclave - no matter what the consequences. "In
the perfect beach resort, nothing is allowed to interrupt the pursuit
of pleasure, not even dying," Leo learns. Filmmaker Danny Boyle
(Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary) and cinematographer Darius
Khondji have captured Alex Garland's parable of modern life and
distilled it into a weird, ironic glimpse of paradise, particularly
when the temporarily deranged Leo runs through the jungle as a
character in a video game. Problem is: the characters are too thinly
drawn and much comes across as pretentious poppycock, particularly the
glib, happy, very commercial ending with Leo back in a cyber-cafe,
downloading a photographic memento of his exotic misadventure. On the
Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, The Beach is a cinematically sweeping
5 - the vivid saga of a Club Med gone awry.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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