Slickly pretentious film with poor narrative. But has it's moments.

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2003)

The beach is a story about the search for paradise and perfection, and what it takes to sustain it. I've never read the book, so I watched the film with no preconceptions.
A completely mad 'daffy' excellently portrayed by Carlyle tells fellow tourist 'Richard' played by DiCaprio of a fabled island, where the sky is always blue, pure white untouched sand lies on the beach, and where there's as much marijuana as you could ever smoke. Seduced by Daffy's to-good-to-be-true description, Richard nevertheless takes along two fellow tourists, Francoise and Etienne to help him find the island.
Once the film has slickly arrived at it's basic premise; all the protagonists have been fully developed, and they're safely ensconced upon the island and settled within the community, the shadow from the opium farmers who share the island has been cast, and Richard's infatuation for Francois has been established, then the end game starts, and the film actually shifts down a gear. A film of two halfs; the second half seems to just run out of ideas and out of steam, introducing tacky elements like Richard becoming part of the computer game that he's always playing. The music while being good seemed to be compensating for the poor narrative. For all it's large budget ($50m) towards the end of the film, to me it came across as a particularly well-rehearsed end of term school play. Everything seemed that obvious.
That's not to say I didn't like the film. It had much merit. I couldn't fault the acting, especially DiCaprio. I liked the camera work(Darius Khondji). Some of the film of Thailand was so enticing - it almost made me want to find such an island.
The one scene that seemed to sum the whole film up for me though, was when Richard and Francoise are looking up at the stars through a telescope. Richard starts talking about the infinity of space and the possibility of parallel universes. He describes how the chances must be quite high that someone out there could be looking back down at us in the same way as we're looking up at them. And she floors his chat-up and romantic idealism with the words, 'Richard, this is just the kind of pretentious bull**** that Americans always say to French girls so they can sleep with them.'

Ouch!
Ultimately, 'The Beach' is film that pretentiously tries so hard to be a great film, yet that romantic idealism comes crashing down because it doesn't truly recognise what's necessary to make it work.