`Beach’ a washout for greedy DiCaprio> Cliched script, star’s plunge into pretension mark `Titanic’ follow-up, inspire walkouts

In theaters

THE BEACH

What’s one to do after going down on the Titanic? If you’re Leonardo DiCaprio, you wash up on “The Beach,” director Danny Boyle’s attractive yet vapid adaptation of Alex Garland’s 1997 best-selling novel.

The film, just like the boring, disenfranchised Gen-Xers it follows, is superficial shlock, a flashy attempt to take Leo out of the mainstream and drop him straight into the deep blue lagoon of something “meaningful.”

But Boyle, oh, Boyle, how this colossal effort drowns. The problem is that Boyle (“Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting”) can’t save Leo from plunging headfirst into pretension. Indeed, the director isn’t enough to keep the actor from taking himself — and his hype — too seriously.

Throughout this film of paradise found, threatened and lost on a remote Thai island, DiCaprio narrates “The Beach” with all the flat, emotionally dead intonation of Edward Norton in “Fight Club,” a film that’s just one of many works referenced here.

With clear echoes of “The Wizard of Oz,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Blue Lagoon,” “Brokedown Palace,” “The Deer Hunter,” and novels such as “Lord of the Flies,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Catcher in the Rye” and “Heart of Darkness,” “The Beach” is an uneven pastiche that completely misses the depth of what it’s trying to mimic.

There is a clear struggle underfoot here, one that has to do with the commercial appeal of DiCaprio’s pinup boy status, and the actor’s now-famous snubbing of that status.

Anyone in the know knows that Leo wants to grow, but with the actor demanding $20 million per film, which he snagged for “The Beach,” Hollywood is only ever going to allow him to grow so much.

And that’s the problem with “The Beach” — Leo’s greed and the Hollywood machine. Growth, in Hollywood, means art, which, to the studios, means box office poison. It’s the rare art film that’s wrapped around a multimillion-dollar budget.

Still, Boyle comes out swinging, trying his best to please everyone. With his camera firmly fixed on DiCaprio’s naked torso, Boyle goes about the painful process of shooting John Hodge’s winded script, a troubled bit of confection of seen-that, read-that cliches that tries to consider all the merit, danger and madness of fleeing human civilization.

For those six teen-age girls noisily putting on their jackets and fleeing “The Beach” midway through my screening, it would seem that DiCaprio, who once probably made these girls swoon, has hit an iceberg of a far different, far more dangerous type. Grade: D+

On video

THE STORY OF US

Rob Reiner’s “The Story of Us” is so removed from reality, so undermined by Hollywood’s idea of what marriage needs to be in order to score a hit at the box office, and so misguided on so many levels, it feels less like the story of a marriage in trouble than it does “The Story of Two Aliens.”

It features two bitter, bickering stereotypes who are meant to represent a realistic married couple, but they don’t. Not once. And that’s because Reiner can’t let go of the past or his commercial leanings to tell the truth about marriage. Instead, he’d rather make a buck off marriage by giving audiences exactly what they already know — yes, marriage can be difficult — while hauling in comedic elements that blatantly recall his film, “When Harry Met Sally.”

In a nutshell, the plot: Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer are Ben and Katie Jordan, a couple whose 15-year marriage isn’t exactly what it used to be. How did it used to be? Reiner answers with a never ending barrage of flashbacks that clog the already trite script with moments so falsely warm and fuzzy, they’re almost as embarrassing as Willis’ ridiculous wig.

Almost, but not quite.

But even worse than that wig are the pseudophilosophical thoughts and ideas about marriage that Reiner and his screenwriters toss in like miniature bits of Dr. Laura and Dr. Ruth. Does anyone really want to hear Reiner, who also appears in the film, compare relationships to a person’s rear end? Perhaps. But the metaphor doesn’t work — and neither does this movie. Grade: D

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”