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Journalism of Courage
Alex Garland8217;s best-selling novel The Beach is a twenty something pothead8217;s daydream of tropical paradise gone bad an anti-Lost Horizon for the jaded, post-Vietnam generation. The English hero, Richard, ventures into Thailand with a head full of flashbacks from Vietnam movies largely Apocalypse Now and a hunger for the kind of real-life experience cruelly denied to prosperous Western kids weaned on video games.
The island utopia on which he stumbles is more exclusive than Club Med and doesn8217;t cost any money, but the scene goes sour, as it must: White people in Southeast Asia have a history of encountering their own hearts of darkness. Garland wrote the book in his mid-20s, a bit young to be discrediting utopian/communal ideals so conclusively. Both his paradise and his climactic inferno feel like hand-me-downs 8212; filtered through innumerable books and films 8212; but his fast, no-bull prose is confident enough to make The Beach read like a portrait of a generation mired in solipsisticdisillusionment instead of like a too-easy product of it.
The Beach is bound to bewilder audiences 8212; and not just the pubescent quot;Leomaniacs,quot; who8217;ll wonder why their romantic idol is suddenly scampering through the tall grass and snarling like a tiger. It will also bewilder 8212; and irritate 8212; anyone who has decided to accept it on its own shallow terms. The movie hasn8217;t earned the right to go twisted and self-hatingand tragic: It hasn8217;t lived.
From the start there8217;s something off in Boyle8217;s storytelling a fanciness that doesn8217;t gibe with his narrator8217;s Richard8217;s point of view. Newly arrived in Bangkok, Richard checks into a seedy hotel and gets regaled through the thin wall by a raucous Scotsman Robert Carlyle with a tale of a quot;tidal lagoon sealed in the clouds.quot; As he babbles, the camera is suddenly airborne, moving across an ocean toward a dark, high-peaked island. Whose point of view is this? It can8217;t be Richard8217;s, since he has never been to the fabled beach and doesn8217;t yet buy the Scotsman8217;s story. If it8217;s the Scotsman8217;s, that seems a goof, too, since the mystery at this point is whether or not he8217;s spinning a fiction. Why does Boyle blow his first climax, so that when Richard finally gazes on the magnificent island, it8217;s deja vu? Because he8217;ll always opt for a showy pictorial effect over one that serves the drama.
The screenplay, by John Hodge,is one of the laziest ever written, a textbook illustration ofwhy narration was for decades a no-no in all but tongue-in-cheek noirish movies. I8217;ve welcomed it back: Used right, it8217;s a good way to add psychological nuance and novelistic detail to a medium of surfaces. But in films like The Beach it8217;s a way to tell us things that ought to be dramatized and to color how we look at objects before we even see them. What kind of adventure movie is it where all the imagery is predigested?
Review of The Beach8217; excerpted from the online magazine Slate slate.com
