Two-dimensional at best and at worst . . .

Rating: 3/10 (8 July 2009)

First question: what's missing? Because something most certainly is, but it is rather hard to pin down quite what that might be. The mystery is that Danny Boyle knows how to make films and then some, but put aside the actual film itself — the acting, the direction, the locations, the action — and instead simply consider the story he tells and the themes he attempts to deal with and The Beach is, to put it mildly, a bit of a mess. Most of the ingredients are there — most, but not all — but mixed in such a way that, sad to say, the moral of The Beach doesn't add up to a row of beans. So why not? What was missing? I suspect that it made a better novel than it does a film. Novels allows the writer more freedom in many crucial ways (I imagine). Films rather tie you down and you run the risk of being far too literal. Every character in The Beach is, at best two-dimensional, and as far as characterisation and motivation are concerned we end up watching something which is closer to a cartoon than a film. Most of the characters are less than two-dimensional, they are one-dimensional, and that is a shame, because treated more sensitively and intelligently, and if it were perhaps less subject to commercial constraints — i.e. with 'heartthrob' Leonard DiCaprio as your main star, making money at the box office will have been very close to the top of the list of the producers' aspirations — there is a very good, very engaging and very thought-provoking film to be made from the material to hand. But The Beach simply isn't it and that by a long chalk. It needed subtlety and it has no subtlety, the central theme (reminiscent of Lord Of The Flies) needs space and time to develop. It is given none. I have no idea what leeway Danny Boyle had, and if he had a lot, the ultimate failure is his, given that he obviously intended to make several 'deep' points'. The story simply does not develop. Crucial scenes are simply presented and the viewer can take it or leave it. Characters do things, but their actions have no basis in their personality. Why did Daffy, the mad Scotsman played with relish by Robert Carlyle, feel the need to escape an apparent paradise and kill himself? There is not even the hint of an explanation. Sal, the apparent leader of those live in the commune, a strong woman with obvious fascist tendencies, should have been far more fleshed out. Who was she, why does this hippie behave so ruthlessly? And there are the members of the commune themselves, faceless to a man and woman: what happened to them that they can apparently with no scruples whatsoever banish one of their own after he becomes badly injured and starts dying of gagrene and they are unable to deal with the noise he makes. Such behaviour deserves at least to be analysed and explored, but Boyle does nothing of the kind. He simply presents it as fact and that is it. Then there is the apparent descent into madness of Richard: what is going on? It happens very fast, he does extraordinary things and finally even kills one of the commune — a murderous act which is ludicrously presented as a mercy killing — but there is neither rhyme nor reason to any of it. These are fatal flaws for a film with obvious pretensions to being 'deep' and which purports to deal with 'deep' ethical and moral quesitons. There are those, of course, who think that there is memorable significance in the lyrics of pop songs and for them The Beach is a reasonable actioner. At the end of the day it all depends what you want. All I can say is that given it's central theme of the ultimate corruptibility of man (and, most pertinently, woman) I was nowhere near getting what I wanted. Sorry. If a film sets itself up to deliver, it sure as hell must deliver, but The Beach delivers nothing but a potpurri of apparent significance. And that's not good enough.