'The Beach': High and Thai By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 11, 2000

Leonardo DiCaprio tries to find paradise in "The Beach." (20th Century Fox)

But maybe Leo fans will watch this edgy MTV-generation travelogue anyway. After all, it's about finding the best beach in the world, hanging out with trust-fund slackers and smoking yourself into spliff oblivion.

Story? Dude, who needs a story when you have attitude and music? "The Beach," produced by the "Trainspotting" team (producer Andrew MacDonald, director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge), is positively buzzing with 'tude, not to mention a relentlessly contemporary score by Angelo ("Twin Peaks") Badalamenti.

Speaking of "Trainspotting," the movie tries to establish its hardcore credentials by casting that movie's co-star, Robert Carlyle.

He's Daffy, a hopped-up Scottish caricature who tells American backpacker Richard (DiCaprio) about something real, something beyond the cybercafe-video-game hell that everyone calls pleasure.

Daffy's talking about a more dangerous paradise, a place he has just returned from. It's a sandy Shangri-la located in some forbidden sector of the Gulf of Thailand, and it's the Best, the Ultimate.

He hands Richard a map of this place, urges him to tell no one else about it and retires to his hotel room to slash his own wrists. Talk about a cameo. Now, it's up to Richard to find The Beach on his own.

Befriending a French couple, Francoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and Etienne (Guillaume Canet), Richard talks them into accompanying him. The going is tough. The only way to reach this location is by swimming across the sea, avoiding the sharks, then evading the gun-toting Thai farmers on the island.

If they survive that, they must leap from a 120-foot waterfall and then – but that would be telling. Well, I have to tell you something, so here goes: Richard finds exactly what he was looking for. No, not a bigger hit than "Titanic." I mean a paradise.

But the big question is this: Is it really paradise when you have to live with Euro dudes and dudettes who constantly give each other high-fives, smoke bales of marijuana before breakfast, fish with bamboo spears and have hippy-dippy town meetings about whose turn it is to go back to the mainland and buy the Triple-A batteries? Send me back to the sharks, man.

If you see this movie for anything, it should be for the geographic vistas. Cinematographer Darius Khondji knows how to exploit Thailand's beauty. The movie also has about a thousand shots of DiCaprio, with about 400 shots of Ledoyen looking adoringly at him. So, if this thing bombs theatrically, it'll recoup its losses at the video store fer sure.

It also has one of the weirdest romantic dances in movie history, in which Richard and Francoise swim out to a school of luminous shrimp at night and frolic among them underwater. I guess that's what you call prawnography. But for the most part, you can throw this adaptation of Alex Garland's novel back into the sea. Leo, do all the movies you want, but don't ever lose that map to James Cameron's production office.

THE BEACH (R, 119 minutes) – Contains graphically mangled limbs, sex, nudity, marijuana use and obscenity, although not necessarily in that order.