The Beach:  drama.  Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Virginie Ledoyen, Guillaume Canet, Tilda Swinton, Robert Carlyle.  Directed by Danny Boyle.  Screenplay by John Hodge, adapted from the novel by Alex Garland.  Rated "R."  Now playing at Bay Area Theaters. 

"The Beach" is a tropical descent into the heart of darkness at the center of paradise, in this case a mythical, hidden beach on an island in Thailand.  The celebrated first novel by Alex Garland (1997) has been turned into a lovely and at times compelling, but in the end oddly unsatisfying Hollywood travelogue, a "Lord of the Flies" transposed to a singles resort, The Scottish team of director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge, and producer  Andrew MacDonald have in the past demonstrated great style and verve.  "Shallow Grave" (1994) raised the thriller to new heights of stylish irony.  "Trainspotting" (1996) was a horrifying, surreal  and hilarious descent into heroin addiction.  "A Life Less Ordinary" (1997) was a charming (at least to this viewer) black comedy.

Now the team returns, but this time replacing stalwart Ewan McGregor with Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio.  Perhaps this shift indicates why some of the dark, edgy resonance of the
novel was lost in translation to the big screen.  DiCaprio, at the age of 25, has finally begun to look like a young man after playing a long series of romantic punks:  "The Basketball Diaries" (drug addict punk), "Total Eclipse" (punk French poet), "Romeo + Juliet"
(postmodern Shakespearean punk), and "Titanic" (steerage-class punk with artistic pretensions).  To his credit, in this film he projects a mixture of naivete and pretension, wholesomeness and decadence, a person able to inhabit both the light and the darkness.  And of course in this film he finds both. 

Richard (DiCaprio) arrives in Bangkok, leaving behind an ill-defined past and seeking an adventure off the usual tourist route.  A night of sensation-seeking culminates in drinking shots of snake’s blood, after which he returns to his cubicle in a hotel on Khao San Road.  After meeting his next-door neighbor, the fetching Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen), he spends the rest of the evening listening to passionate lovemaking through the wall.  Rescue comes from his other neighbor, a half-mad Scottish expat (played with lunatic flair by Robert Carlyle) babbling about a remote, beautiful beach.  After giving Richard a treasure map of the island, he promptly kills himself, leaving the police to deal with a passport in the name of "Daffy Duck," resident of "Never Never Land."  Recovering his senses, Richard realizes he now has something to offer Francoise; he convinces her and boyfriend Etienne (Guillaume Canet) to seek out the mythical island with him.

After a long journey across Thailand and swimming to the off-limits island, they discover a huge field of marijuana. Paradise indeed -- except for Thai guards toting AK-47s.  Beating a hasty retreat, they make their way over a waterfall to the Beach, surrounded on all sides by sheer rock walls.  There lives a thriving community, the healthiest-looking group of young multinational expats imaginable.  In short order, Richard settles in, becomes a hero and gets the girl. 

But of course there is a canker in Paradise.  The matriarch of the Beach, Sal (Tilda Swinton) and her brooding mate cast an ominous pall over the dope-smoking and hanging-out 60's atmosphere, especially when it comes to maintaining the secret of the Beach.  No one, it seems, ever leaves the island (except for Daffy Duck), save Sal on her periodic supply runs.  Soon enough the outside world intrudes.  Richard had given a copy of the map to a couple of loose-mouthed American dopers, who bring a small expedition to paradise.  Cast out by Sal for his lack of discretion and falling prey to Vietnam flashbacks, paradise quickly turns into apocalypse. 

Perhaps this glossy film, lovely on the surface but lacking depth, is an inevitable result of the turning of a gang of fringe Scottish filmmakers into Hollywood professionals.  The stylish and surreal cinematography of "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" have morphed into the merely lush.  The beach and lagoon (digitally enclosed by mountains) and the island itself are the most consistently colorful characters in the film, thanks to cinematographer Darius Khondji.   The dark interiors of the earlier films have given way to bright outdoor sets; in place of a descent into the underworld of addiction, we watch DiCaprio and Ledoyen sinking underwater as they make love in the lagoon.  The foreboding of Garland’s novel remains, but muted by the Hollywood tropical gloss. 

The theme of "The Beach," the despoiling created by the search for unspoiled places, was aptly illuminated by the media circus created by the filming in Thailand.  During two weeks of location shots on Phi Phi Lay, a protected island in the Hat Noppharat Thara National Park on the Andaman Sea, some Thais celebrated the boon to the tourist trade, offering tours to "Leo’s Island"  Meanwhile, environmental groups protested the alleged despoiling of a pristine beach, for the use of which Fox paid the Thai government $100,000.  British author Garland, 25 when he wrote the novel, after backpacking since 17, had begun to question his sort of vicarious thrill-seeking in the adventure playground of the Third World. 

The Scot team’s success allowed them to capture one of the hottest Hollywood stars (for a reported $20 million) and a budget to match, and in the process lost some of the offbeat charm that infused their earlier works.  As success brings the seeds of its own failure, so does the boom in adventure travel, aided by cheap air fares, accelerate the extinction of wild places. It’s another example of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:  the mere act of observing produces random disorder at the quantum level.  So, too, the search for paradise ultimately ends in paradise lost.