Back when I worked at the bookstore we used to hand-sell this book like mad. Smart hipsters would come in (this was Portland at century's turn) asking for a summer read and we'd head straight for Alex Garland. It's the story of a kid searching for adventure in Thailand, being given a map to a secret Shangri-la by a crazy man just before he offs himself, then taking a beautiful French girl and her boyfriend with him on a quest to find the place. This was Garland's first novel, he was still a kid, really, but his voice was already strong, his narrative well-structured, his hunger for philosophical inquiry ignited, his sensibility a little stranger and smarter than most, and he hadn't yet launched into wild-exploration mode as he did with Tesseract and Coma, worthy works but less readily accessible than the Beach, lacking in its buoyant, dangerous vivacity.
Then the movie came out, and we couldn't give the damn thing away.
I missed it in the cinema at the time, and now I wish I hadn't. It seems to me (from my far-off recollection) that it follows the letter of the novel rather exactly, while missing its spirit almost completely. The then-nascent Danny Boyle gives it the interestingly-skewed but lushly beautiful cinematography and flow of a music video, and when you're done, that's what it feels like you've seen.
That's too harsh, though. It has more to offer than I thought. Boyle is intrepid at the helm, albeit navigating down an ill-chosen canal; Tilda Swinton gives Sal, the island's Big Kahuna, a bold and cryptic turn which is entirely appropriate and delivers her with such lucid comportment that the character feels full and true despite limited screen-time. DiCaprio, on the other hand, misses plumbing that deep well of inner darkness the hero needs to plumb in order to carry the story.
All in all, the movie loses the book's creeping, Lord-of-the-Flies sense of menace and we wind up with a cadre of Euro-narcissists in their own private seaside resort, making it difficult to care about outcomes.
Robert Carlyle plays the catalytic trickster who calls himself Daffy Duck, takes a shine to the serious young hero (a hero more thoughtful in the book than the film, in which he seems less introspective than the plot requires) and leaves a map to paradise as a parting legacy before opening his veins in a squalid Bangkok bedsit. He has only one scene then a sort of reprise as a dream-character later, and brings to it all his psychotic intensity, which is considerable. Boyle lights him well in his early scene, eerily and strongly, because this instigating moment is crucial, and if we don't buy it, the movie is a goner.
But we do buy it, against the odds, since the script seems, well, daffily lightweight in its logic, having lost in translation the truth of yearning communicated in the novel. When Daffy speaks of the perfection of the beach, a perfection which has driven him somehow mad, the weight is in the delivery, not the words themselves. Carlyle has once again so thrown all his heft into his role that he drags the script up a notch with him through sheer torque and will-power.
His magic doesn't stretch far enough to save the film, of course, which is, however, not the catastrophe I was always led to believe. And sometimes even a bad movie leads to good things: in this case, the later fruitful pairing of Garland and Boyle in 28 Days Later and Sunshine.
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