He has heard tales of the beach: the sugar sand leading to a phosphorescent sea, the beautiful people living in an unruffled commune, the symbiosis of modern man and primal nature. And if these attractions don't give you a high, then the free dope will--it sprouts like kudzu all over the place. Now Richard, the narrator of the book and film The Beach, has somehow reached this ideal island in Thailand, this littoral dream made literal. But Utopia isn't good enough for Richard, because he's questing, he's weak, he's ornery...he's Leonardo DiCaprio.
The Beach opened last week preceded by the odor of dead fish. Early word was disastrous, and the first reviews didn't help. From this critic's seat, the view is mixed. The film that director Danny Boyle and scripter John Hodge have fashioned from Alex Garland's novel has plenty of beguilements and even more problems. It's a big, mixed bag, ambitious and frustrating, with a lot on its mind and a daring, assured performance from the young star. In short, it's a typical DiCaprio movie.
Always remember this: for DiCaprio, Titanic--the all-time blockbuster that made him king of the movie world--was an anomaly, a fluke. He built his career not by playing the blameless hero in big swoony technotrash but by finding weird corners and gray areas in troubled teens in small, off-Broadwayish movies. He was a critics' darling before he was a heartthrob. The easy ingratiation he paraded in Titanic is one of his gifts, but not the most notable. We prefer his off-kilter choice of projects, his perfect pitch within so many of the characters he's played.
He could have incarnated Top Guns and baby Terminators, or starred in any of a zillion teen comedies. But he chose a tougher route to filling out his resume. And as it grew, in his seven major roles before Titanic, a portrait of the young artist began to emerge. So often DiCaprio played the emotional orphan, in a forlorn quest not for a father but for his own budding maturity--for a chance to become the man who needs no father.
He burst on the scene, seemingly out of nowhere --the soap Santa Barbara, the sitcom Growing Pains (as a homeless kid), bits in Critters 3 and Poison Ivy--as Toby in This Boy's Life. He is at the center of this movie about a boy who bad-lucks into a stint with an abusive stepfather. And he holds the center; he can commandeer the screen doing nothing, with an eloquent slouch and a gaze that says, beneath the winsomeness, I can take it.
He is just as willful and complex playing Arnie, the retarded boy living under a death sentence in What's Eating Gilbert Grape; as he is playing Meryl Streep's pyromaniac son Hank in Marvin's Room. Other young actors, to keep viewers on their side, would strike the sympathy key fortissimo. But DiCaprio, knowing that he had a cuddly-toy quality (a face just shy of puberty, a smile that, in his first TV spot, was used to sell milk), barely rouged the rougher aspects of his characters. Toby is a decent kid, but his stabs at '50s punkdom rasp the nerves. Arnie is so aware of his doom that when he tells a new friend, "I could go at any time," it sounds like a come-on; yet his rampages drive his saintly brother (Johnny Depp) to violence. And Hank could be just a bad kid trapped in a boy-angel's body. But DiCaprio could be all of these very different kids, plausibly and attractively.