First half is tolerable, then DiCaprio jumps the shark

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2015)

The Beach (Fox, 2000, UK/USA) is a Danny Boyle drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Richard, a backpacking college student who gets lost in Thai "paradise," after following the map of a wild-eyed man, Daffy (Robert Carlyle).
The film is nicely framed throughout, emphasizing the natural cycles of activity in Thailand proper and on the island. The dynamism of Thai urban nightlife is captured, the revelry, the stampeding of western tourists clad with backpacks and Birkenstocks. They chase adventure and experience before it's time to settle down into responsible, civilized Euro-American life. Boyle achieves a stylish look for the film mostly with night shots of the tourist hordes and in the shaded, alley-like bazaars in the urban Thai locations.
The initial scenes of the film follow Richard through these bazaars and shacks, before entering the last hostel he crashes at. Even when Richard is surrounded by locals, the environment feels despoiled by the unseen presence of more tourists. You almost get a sense that shots are alternating every so often between large Thai insects, snakes, monkeys, and sharks on one hand and tourists on the other. These first scenes are still a lot of fun, they're fresh. The dynamism of DiCaprio here might've been a boon to the Thai tourism industry.
Tourism's presented as something that overruns the local cultural ecology and is regarded as a type of spoiling and infestation. It destroys the beauty and authenticity of anything actually worth exploring. The allure of the Beach is it's hidden, this fact makes the place legendary, everyone's heard about it but nobody's been there, until Richard meets Daffy. Daffy, whose been to the Beach, gives Richard the map, but tells him to keep it to himself, this turns out to be Daffy's last command.
Richard hits the town, comes back, he can't open his door, and the beautiful Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) comes right on time to show Richard how to use his key. Just when Richard is ready to celebrate his prospects with Francoise, her smooth talking man Etienne (Guillaume Canet) shows up like a cold shower. Eventually, Richard tells them about the Beach and invites them to go with him. Before they take off, Richard makes a copy of the map and gives it to the people who'd invited him in from a storm when he'd lost the key to his cabin.
Richard, Fraincoise and Etienne finally get to the island with the Beach and it isn't easy. Once they make it through the mountains enveloping the island, they're enamored with a vast field of marijuana plants. Then they see it's being patrolled by rough-looking guards rocking bandannas, AK-47s and cute little leashed monkeys. They escape by getting low, snaking through the field and jumping past a waterfall into a lake.
Now they're in paradise and there's a small, diverse colony of people there. Tilda Swinton is Sal, who shines as the no bull***t president of paradise. This is a proverbial "is it heaven? or is it hell?" story. Everything starts out pleasant and unravels with time. Unfortunately, the film itself unravels the same way. They "jump the shark," or more accurately knife the shark. The movie haphazardly refers to "Heart of Darkness," and mentions group dynamics in the dialog without really letting them play out on screen, at best we get pair dynamics. Characters inexplicably fall off the map, especially Etienne who seems like a decent stand up guy.
The Beach doesn't seem to have any allure or hidden treasures behind what we see when we're first introduced to it. It's not because it turns out to be a hell instead of a paradise, the hell dimension isn't achieved in this film. When one character's suffering gets to be too much for the group, they put him out. There are scares and close calls, a few characters get hell, but the main characters manage to pack up and leave before total hellish misery shows itself. Without that element of total misery, it's hard to understand why they make their unanimous decision at the end.
The movie tries to convince us that Richard is the one who's descended into madness, when it's really Sal who we need to be watching out for. It's understandable why DiCaprio is the focal point of the film, he's just about in every scene, but allowing Sal some more time would've made more sense given the climax. The climax, by the way, was a major disappointment, Richard vacillates from psychosis to altruism in short order. Anyway if there are lessons, they're in why we can't have nice things... The treasured things in life are lost when we can't share them, and we easily forget about the nice things people did for us.