Why ‘The Beach’ Is a Lost Leonardo DiCaprio Classic

Every few months, RollingStone.com shines a spotlight on a forgotten, neglected, overshadowed, underappreciated and/or critically maligned film that we love in a series called “Be Kind, Rewind.”  In honor of The Revenant and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s widely predicted Oscar win, we’re focusing on an older Leo movie that’s been unfairly put in the “noble failure” pile: The Beach.

It’s February 2000, a little over two years since Titanic plowed directly into the zeitgeist, and the film’s 25-year-old star is now slightly more famous than the ship of dreams itself. No actor on the planet is more difficult to extricate from the aura of his public image; no other actor brings more baggage to a new part. 

Other than a fitting cameo in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, Danny Boyle‘s The Beach is the first movie that Leonardo DiCaprio has shot since becoming the King of the World. His most loyal subjects expected another A-list victory lap full of sound, fury and CGI set pieces. Instead, Hollywood’s hottest heartthrob followed up his role in the biggest blockbuster since Gone With the Wind by playing a generic American backpack brat who buys a one-way trip to Thailand in search of “something more beautiful, something more exciting, and something more dangerous.” Cue mass Leo-phile confusion.

Unsurprisingly, people don’t love The Beach. It stands at 19% on Rotten Tomatoes (for context, that’s 27 percentage points lower than Ted 2). It underwhelmed at the domestic box office. It didn’t satisfy a legion of confused fans who were sold an edgy update of Blue Lagoon, only to find something that more closely resembled a watered down and warless remake of Apocalypse Now. In the end, the film’s $50 million domestic haul barely doubled DiCaprio’s salary. 

But hindsight can reveal all sorts of hidden wonders. Whatever part he decided to play after Jack Dawson, DiCaprio knew that viewers weren’t going to be able to disentangle the character from the actor behind him, and he was perceptive enough to pretend otherwise. Boyle has spoken openly about how consciously he and his leading man manipulated the latter’s stardom to their advantage. “I talked to Leo about this,” he told Time Magazine in an interview published shortly after the movie’s release. “And he felt his options prior to making the movie were either to confirm his standing from Titanic, dynamite it with American Psycho, or to use what he had and take the audience with him. The latter was, to both our minds, more interesting.” 

In other words, DiCaprio would essentially be playing himself.

“My name is Richard, so what else do you need to know?” In any other movie, that opening line of voiceover would sound like a sub-Tarantino provocation, but DiCaprio’s stardom completely transforms it. It’s as if he’s declaring: “I’m the kid from Titanic, you know I’m the kid from Titanic, so let’s just accept that and move forward.” It’s the first self-reflexive salvo in a film that takes pains to make sure that you never forget who you’re watching. The Beach wants you to see Richard through the lens of the superstar playing him, and vice-versa. The King of the World was casting off his crown.