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Every promising career needs a catastrophe, if only for a change of pace, and Total Eclipse was DiCaprio's. This is the movie folks rent to snag a glimpse of the star's naughty bits (for which a slow button, a magnifying glass and a vivid imagination are required). No more Mr. Nice Guy; as Arthur Rimbaud, Paris' teen-poet sensation of 1870, DiCaprio has a talent to abuse. In an early sketch for the out-of-control movie star he so cagily plays in Celebrity, Rimbaud stands naked on an attic window ledge, pisses on someone he doesn't care for, sodomizes his friend Paul Verlaine. Well, the older poet asked for it--begged for it. Rimbaud is Verlaine's slut, coquette, dominatrix and muse. This rollicking atrocity of a film offers the most convulsive affair in the DiCaprio oeuvre, and the clearest image of the awful power the young, gorgeous and deranged have over those brave and stupid enough to fall in love with them.
"I decided to be a genius," Rimbaud says. "I decided to originate the future." What DiCaprio was originating in his next phase was rambunctious guys with no future at all. Rimbaud: poisoned by infection. Kid, the gunpoke in The Quick and the Dead: shot dead by his dastardly dad. Jim, the Catholic schoolboy in The Basketball Diaries: nearly kills himself with heroin. At least these misfits courted disaster. The only sin of the noble DiCaprio hero in Romeo+ Juliet and Titanic is to be caught in the wrong place with the girl he loves. Has any teen idol played so many characters who end up dead? (DiCaprio's double role in The Man in the Iron Mask doesn't suit our thesis--he is pampered by four father figures and gives a soggy performance--so we'll ignore it.)
After Titanic, DiCaprio could have done anything. The lead in The Talented Mr. Ripley: that sounded fitting. Instead, he crashed on The Beach. Whatever the new movie has going for it or against it, DiCaprio's choice of this unusual proj-ect--a contemplative action movie, an interior thriller--is true to the contours of his career so far. He wants to try new stuff, stretch his range, see how far he can go and take his fans with him. If it flops, and the next one (Martin Scorsese's The Gangs of New York) too, what's the worst that can happen? He won't be a big star anymore? O.K., but he'll always be an actor.
As Richard, the American abroad, DiCaprio is a young adult, but no less isolated than in his teen-angst films. Here, as in This Boy's Life, he lies in bed listening to a couple next door banging away at their amours. A madman on the other side of the wall, named Daffy (Robert Carlyle), leaves Richard a map to the treasure island. When he and the couple, Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet), trek to the hidden beach, Richard is happy to fit in with the communers, even with the strict rules enunciated by Sal (Tilda Swinton), the camp's queen bee. Still, he feels isolated. A fabulous resort is no fun if a fellow isn't getting laid. As he says, "Desire is desire wherever you go. The sun will not bleach it, nor the tide wash it away."