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And a secret garden isn't as special if it doesn't remain secret. Before heading for the island, Richard had left a map with some other Americans. Now they are trying to enter, and it is his duty to keep them away and get the map. It is also time for a semi-idyllic Beach Party to morph into Apocalypse Now. Richard descends, or rather soars, into savagery. This handsomely made film--as attentive to Nature's predatory beauty as any film since Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line--goes a bit nuts, along with him. It sheds plausibility like a snakeskin, even as it accrues a needless cinematheque of references: to The Lord of the Flies, The Sheltering Sky, The Deer Hunter. It renounces the audience's complicities when it needs them most.
In the novel, Richard is a mirror of his author: a 20-something Brit drifting toward a bright sea with dark eddies. And there was a little rancor when Ewan McGregor, the Scot who'd starred in Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary for Boyle and Hodge, lost the role of Richard to a $20 million golden boy from Hollywood. But the book and the film, for all their differences, have the same point to make. This is a story about how young people with the best intentions can turn a jungle paradise (like Vietnam) into a nightmare war zone (like Vietnam). Thus it makes sense that the lead character--the game boy who tumbles into a foreign heart of darkness and, almost too late, realizes it is his--should be American. Vietnam was our mess, thanks awfully. We'll take it.
So, yes, DiCaprio. It was smart of Boyle to court him for the part, brave of the actor to take it. Let's have a new kind of action star, one who calls into question (as the character and the film do) the very need for violent action movies. That's DiCaprio here: less Rambo than Rimbaud; a wild child back in the jungle. And, like Arnie and Hank and the Kid, a little boy lost. But the role doesn't play to all his strengths. He's most seductive when in repose; here he is on the move, reacting to trouble rather than causing it. He's waiting for something to happen rather than someone to slap or save him. He can't save the film when it goes haywire, because he is as stranded as Richard is.
Which leaves us with a suspicion that won't please Leo, his agent or Hollywood: maybe DiCaprio is a superb supporting actor. He needs something besides the great awful world--he needs other imposing actors--to play against and within. He needs other eyes to gaze into besides the camera's: aDepp or Claire Danes. On his own, even a talent like DiCaprio isn't acting; he's play-acting.
An actor who comes to the screen in youth is like an IPO; audiences invest themselves in his future. After Titanic, the DiCaprio stock was goofily inflated. In the wake of The Beach, it may dip. But we should not confuse the achievement of an actor--especially one as daring, engaging and resourceful as DiCaprio--with the popularity or even success of any one film. He and we are in it for the long run. It ought to be an adventure, following the Kid on a career-long journey in search of his best or most dangerous self.