Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Former drug czar Bill Bennett tells the story of traveling to Anchorage, Alaska to speak out in favor of attempts to repeal Alaska’s legalization of marijuana. Bennett expected a large crowd of pro-marijuana protesters to greet him, but was surprised that only a few bedraggled refugees from Woodstock Nation showed up at a rally. The reason? The leaders of the protest printed the wrong date on the flyer. The moral? “Marijuana makes you stupid and inattentive,” Bennett wrote.

And there, in a nutshell, is the message of The Beach. Pot makes you dumb. Dumb enough, in Leonardo DiCaprio’s case, to turn down a shot making a Spiderman movie for James Cameron and make this clunky vanity piece about an attempt to recapture paradise on a tropical island in Thailand. Dumb enough, in the audience’s case, to sit through annoying self-important DiCaprio voice-overs and a wretched storyline. Dumb enough for everyone except the most besotted pre-teen DiCaprio fan or the most dedicated movie reviewer to walk out of the theater shaking their heads.

The pre-teen girls in the audience will get good shots of a pretty tropical island and DiCaprio’s mostly bare chest. (The boys in the audience are not nearly so fortunate in the bare-chest department.) And the movie reviewers will get hours upon hours of satisfaction in making cruel, cruel fun of this woeful piece of dreck.

Let’s start off at the top. DiCaprio shows up in Thailand, armed with three T-shirts and a whole line of stupid Holden Caufield voiceovers. He is immediately set upon by a sharp Thai street vendor who offers him a tall glass of cobra blood, among other local delights. DiCaprio begs off, until the vendor taunts him, saying that all tourists want Thailand to be just like America. This causes DiCaprio to turn on his heel and say, bring on the cobra blood.

This, of course, begs the question: What’s Leo’s beef with Uncle Sammy? The economy is good. Nobody got killed because of Y2K. Clinton will be gone this time next year. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring traning. What’s so bad about America? (Last year’s big escapist fantasy, Fight Club, at least made a case — albeit a shallow and nonserious one — against American materialism. The Beach seems to take the idea of America being a rotten place for granted.)

Next, Leo checks in to his hotel room and confronts the classic tourist problem: What to do next? He hangs around the hotel for a while until he is confronted with a grinning maniac named Daffy (Robert Carlyle, looking much more sinister here than he did as a Bond villain). Daffy tells him about this mythical perfect beach out there on a desert island. Daffy then conveniently kills himself, and thoughtfully leaves a map for DiCaprio to follow. (Not in that order.)

DiCaprio, meanwhile, has developed an infatuation with a French chick in the room down the hall (Virginie Ledoyen). The French chick, unfortunately, has a boyfriend (Guillaume Canet) and, apparently, is unseducable as a result. DiCaprio comes up with a stunningly stupid plan: he and the French chick and the boyfriend should all go to this mythical island. For some reason known only to the screenwriters, they say yes and all take off together.

Now, I have to admit, I have said dumber things to women than “Hey, you and your boyfriend want to come to a romantic desert island with me?” Granted. And if DiCaprio’s character is a little hard up for nookie, I sympathize, just a little. But DiCaprio is in Bangkok, for crying out loud. Going to Bangkok and not finding female companionship is like going to Las Vegas and not getting free drinks. It’s like going to Seattle and not getting wet. It’s like — similies fail me — going to Tulsa, Oklahoma and not being bored. (And if DiCaprio was really looking for French chicks, why the heck didn’t he just go to Paris in the first place?)

Another example of the marijuana-related stupidity of the movie occurs when DiCaprio is locked out of his beachhouse on the way to the mythical beach. He falls in with two surfer dudes, who regale him with a supposed “urban legend” about the perfect beach (and the perfect, everlasting supply of pot). DiCaprio shrugs off the legend, but leaves a copy of the map for the surfer dudes before he leaves.

This is stupid. (DiCaprio’s character even admits that this is stupid.) You’re going to this perfect, legendary, unspoiled paradise, and the only people you invite are Pauly Shore wannabees? You’re going with this French chick and her boyfriend, and you don’t even arrange for suitable female companionship for yourself? (The surfer dudes don’t show up on the island until much later, and they turn out to be bright enough to bring girls along.)

And as silly and stupid as these scenes are, things go downhill when our little romantic triangle hits The Beach. After a couple of chase scenes involving a small band of pirates that grow marijuana on the non-scenic part of the island, DiCaprio and companions dive into an idyllic paradise community populated by Woodstock Nation rejects and wannabees. It’s a groovy hippie commune, you dig, complete with unlimited free dope and no L-7s around to cramp your style, no fuzz to hassle you. Groovy, man.

The commune members (nobody in the movie uses the word) are all nice, wonderful people who ask nothing more than to be able to play beach volleyball (and beach soccer, and beach cricket, of all things) in peace. At one with the universe, man. They swim and smoke pot and fish and smoke pot and do communal chores and smoke pot and hang out in one big communal sleeping room. Of course, the only way you could do this in real life is exactly the way it was done in the movie: spend millions of other people’s money to pay extras to come to Thailand and pretend to be happy hippie beachcombers. Everyone in the commune has a smug smile on their face, and why shouldn’t they? They know they’ll get to go back to their air-conditioned trailer at the end of the day and watch ESPN and eat catered food. Probably shrimp.

Anyway, for The Beach to work as a movie to any extent, the arrival of DiCaprio and friends would have to somehow muck up paradise. If it keeps on being paradise, the movie would run for days to an empty audience — everyone having already left for Thailand. (Easier said than done, though. I checked it out on Travelocity: the cheapest flight from Austin to Bangkok is $2500, roundtrip, you have to change planes in San Francisco and Tokyo, and it takes two full days.) You would think that inserting two French people and a vain American college kid who wanders around talking in self-important voiceovers would be enough to ruin any Utopian society in and of itself. If that’s not enough, of course there’s lots of fun ways to rig the storyline so that paradise gets destroyed. It would have been fun, for example, to see the hippies run out of pot and have to scavenge in the fields owned by the pirates for more marijuana, like the rabbits from Watership Down invading a small farm.

Nothing remotely as good as that happens. Even the love triangles don’t move the story along much or make life in paradise that much more interesting. The only way the screenplay shakes up the story a little bit is by doing two things: having a minor character get bit by a shark and moving DiCaprio out in the woods. The sharkbite victim screams incessantly (hey, what happened to the medicinal properties of pot?) and is moved to the other side of the island where his shrieks of tormented pain won’t bum everybody out and ruin the volleyball tournament. DiCaprio is exiled, too, ostensibly to watch the aforementioned surfer dudes who have found their way to an adjoining island. The loneliness quickly drives DiCaprio insane (and it’s a short drive).

The movie ends, mercifully, with the consequences of DiCaprio’s insanity and the collapse of the commune. But right before the end, right before the lights come down on this movie that’s ostensibly about the evils of capitalist society and the goodness of marijuana-smoking second-generation hippies, the audience is treated to that most capitalistic of art forms: the clever product placement. The Beach ends with DiCaprio reading an e-mail on an iMac sent through excite.com. And that’s the final lesson of The Beach: Marijuana makes you stupid, but capitalism makes you rich.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 7:34 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.