The Beach at 25: A Youthful Transgression for Leonardo DiCaprio

Imagine if a movie in 2025 made nearly $300 million worldwide against a budget of less than $100 million. Now imagine that this non-sequel movie was sold not on action spectacle, superheroes, a bestselling novel, or a packed ensemble of familiar faces, but rather a solitary movie star whose last starring role was two years earlier. Today, this would be considered, if not a miracle, at least a semi-magical anomaly. Even a decade back, it would be considered very impressive. But 25 years ago, when The Beach was released in theaters as the first “real” follow-up to Leonardo DiCaprio’s superstar-making turn in Titanic, it was a massive disappointment. (The above-mentioned numbers were “just” $150 million and $50 million, respectively; honestly, even unadjusted for inflation, they would be considered a success for a young star in 2025. Challengers would have been delighted with those global numbers.) That doesn’t seem especially fair, but it is appropriate that this particular movie would somehow qualify as both an unlikely accomplishment and a crushing disappointment. That’s The Beach all over.

It’s also a project both perfectly suited for DiCaprio, then in his mid-twenties, and an odd fit given its origins. The film was adapted from a novel by Alex Garland – yes, that one – by filmmaking team Danny Boyle (director), Andrew Macdonald (producer), and John Hodge (screenwriter), who made Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and A Life Less Ordinary in quick succession. Those three all starred Ewan McGregor, who assumed the leading role in The Beach would be his as well. But Boyle could receive more generous financing with a bigger name, and lucky for him, DiCaprio showed interest in the project as his true follow-up to the biggest movie of all time (The Man in the Iron Mask, filmed earlier, was a hit while Titanic was still in theaters in the spring of 1998; Celebrity, released that fall, gave him a small role as, essentially, himself). DiCaprio’s youthful, insouciant hunger onscreen makes him good casting as Richard, an American traveling through Bangkok and desperate for a genuinely new, non-tourist-trodden experience. But the poor-man’s-Trainspotting narration, where a restless Richard verbally casts about for a worldly philosophy, would probably just plain sound more convincing coming from McGregor. (Maybe this is an American’s own anti-American, pro-Scottish-accent bias.)

It’s also – maybe, admittedly, too easy – to picture McGregor reuniting with his Trainspotting co-star Robert Carlyle in the early scenes, where the latter plays a fellow traveler, drunken and ranting, staying at the same Bangkok hotel, who tells Richard of a secret island in the Gulf of Thailand. He even draws him a map, seemingly just before committing suicide. Richard, blessed with a youthful callowness, takes this harrowing experience as an opportunity to invite a French couple down the hall to join him on a crazy journey (mostly because he has the hots for Françoise, played by Virginie Ledoyen). They agree, and eventually the trio does make their way to a hidden oasis, discovering a full-on miniature society led by Sal (Tilda Swinton in an early role). Ample sun, gorgeous blue water, white-sand beach, fun and games, communal living, shared chores, and only the occasional two-person trips to the mainland for supplies, otherwise cut off from the rest of civilization… it is, for reasons he’s only half-successful at articulating, Richard’s paradise, and the others’ too. Were The Beach made even a little bit further into the 21st century, it would almost certainly need to incorporate some kind of unplugging, anti-tech sentiment; at the turn of the century (the film was shot in 1999), the fact that the island has no phone or internet isn’t even mentioned directly – though by opting out of Y2K paranoia entirely, it becomes its own entry in that period’s canon of technological ambivalence.

Regardless, this reverie can’t last, and because this is a Danny Boyle movie, there is a section in the final stretch where the protagonist approaches, and possibly crosses over into, sheer madness. This is the portion of the movie most likely to have alienated DiCaprio’s young fanbase; it’s also the where seems like especially apt casting, particularly in retrospect. At the time, DiCaprio was a viable romantic lead, most famous for playing a gallant free spirit; though he would subsequently see some great success leaning into his boyishness, as in Catch Me If You Can, his long-term collaboration with Martin Scorsese was around the corner, and those roles play his youthful looks against a grown-up intensity. The Beach jumps into those waters headfirst in its back half, as Richard, temporarily exiled from the group to serve as sort of an island security guard, skulks and seethes around the island’s jungle, spying on everyone (both his adopted community and the drug-growers who inhabit the other side of the island), setting traps, and at one point imagining himself in a video game. Boyle kinda goes nuts here, too, adapting the hallucinatory techniques of his other movies, most famously and successfully Trainspotting, to get into Richard’s fevered mind. DiCaprio’s later 2000s-era freakouts would be those of a boy fighting and panicking his way into manhood; for this one movie, they’re pure youth-culture fuckery, something Boyle taps into with sweaty aplomb.

Some contemporaneous notices accused The Beach of not really amounting to much, maybe because the closing minutes waffle on its most provocative themes, closing on a note that’s more wistful than despairing. (Garland, true to the apocalyptic nature of his other work, apparently went a bit harder in the book, though Richard survives the trip in both versions.) But apart from that hesitation, Boyle’s film isn’t especially sparing in its portrayal of society-rejecting communal living as a form of selfishness. For all the shared labor and bunking-together bonhomie, the residents are often unwilling to help each other: One grievous injury paralyzes everyone else not so much with indecision but inconvenience, eventually simply dragging him far enough away that they can’t hear his cries of pain. When Richard starts to lose his mind, one of his friends takes him aside to tell him, essentially, that people are talking and he better knock it off. In the film’s climax, Sal repeatedly prioritizes the sanctity of her community over the actual people in it. Maybe not the most surprising turn of events, but it’s nonetheless interesting that Boyle doesn’t especially imply that this is a microcosm of “normal” society so much as a doomed (if irresistible) flouting of it.

Indeed, there’s plenty about The Beach that fits with Boyle’s eclectic subsequent work, even though this one’s supposed flop – it remains one of his biggest international hits – caused a career reset. The Beach turned out to be a pivotal movie for pretty much all involved: It was Boyle’s first sort-of collaboration with Garland, who would go on to write 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and his second movie of many for Fox, and despite the disappointment, was surely more of a reassurance than the reviled bomb A Life Less Ordinary. As for DiCaprio, it was essentially his last hurrah as a star who might take on a traditional vehicle. He spent the next decade-plus making movies for Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Edward Zwick, Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and Baz Luhrmann – all more established in their careers than Boyle was in 2000. It’s an enviable great-taste filmography, the fullness of which can read a little safe, especially now that DiCaprio chooses his projects even more carefully. The Beach, messy and strange as it is in spots, came to be seen as sort of a minor youthful transgression. Like a lot of those, at a certain point it’s easy to look back and wish that maybe there were a few more like it.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.