Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 25 June

The Beach (Boyle, 2000)

After spending Saturday afternoon with 28 Years Later, I thought it might be fun to reacquaint myself with the first collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland. For some reason I thought Garland had been the screenwriter on The Beach but it turns out that he only wrote the novel (only!) that it was based on. Regular Boyle screenwriter at the time John Hodge (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary) did the adaptation. Garland himself would go on to write 28 Days Later and the brilliant Sunshine for Boyle before finding director’s chairs for himself with the likes of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Civil War.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Richard, a young American backpacker bumming his way around South East Asia. In Bangkok he encounters deranged Daffy (Robert Carlyle) who tells him about a (virtually) undiscovered, pristine, beach on a remote island. Daffy then goes on to commit bloody suicide leaving Richard a hand-drawn map of the challenging route to said beach. Knowing about the beach gives Richard rather more social caché than he normally possesses and he persuades two attractive French tourists (Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) to join him on the quest.

Once there they do indeed find that breathtaking beach but also something between a commune and a cult, led by Tilda Swinton’s Sal. It’s imperative, she says, that nobody ever finds this beach because the ruthless drug lords who let them stay do not want anyone knowing about their lucrative plantation. This news is too late for Richard, though, who was shooting his mouth off about it back in Bangkok.

Made before Boyle discovered all the cinematic fireworks that he would show off in 28 Days Later, 127 Hours and Slumdog (split screens, multiple digital formats), The Beach is a very tidy portrait of a time and a place – the late 90s as cheap travel and Lonely Planet guides send hordes of young Westerners on voyages of discovery or debauchery around the developing world. It’s surprisingly clear-headed from this distance about how little those people belonged and how much entitlement they managed to display at the same time.

It’s a performance by DiCaprio, too, that was easy to underestimate at the time. Still coming off the high of Titanic, his star power would have done a lot to sell the film but he shows off his admirable ability to downplay things when he needs to. Saturday night was the first time in more than 20 years that I’d been back to The Beach, but the soundtrack – like many of Boyle’s films – has been a fixture for me for a long time, especially the guilty pleasure of All Saints’ Pure Shores.

I joked about this with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights a couple of weeks ago, but it is inconceivable to me that that The Beach has only 21% on the (utterly discredited) Rotten Tomatoes website. Ridiculous.

Back in 2013, I was delighted be asked to host an introduction to a screening of Danny Boyle’s new film at the time, Trance. The Light House cinema in Wellington wanted me to do a PowerPoint presentation summarising Boyle’s career and I thought I would kick it off with this wee montage which I really enjoyed making. Managed to include Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Millions, 28 Days Later, The Beach, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and James Bond and Her Majesty the Queen from Isles of Wonder (the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony).

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Where to watch The Beach