The Titanic star rises again

Three years after going down with the ``Titanic'', Leonardo DiCaprio floats up once more, in a film that is great to look at, but may not do much to advance the career of its charismatic star. ANAND PARTHASARATHY examines the decade-long screen presence of Hollywood's favourite boy-man before he ended up on ``The Beach''.

``HE'S PROBABLY the world's most beautiful looking man - yet he doesn't think he is that gorgeous'', says Kate Winslet, his co- star in the phenomenally popular ``Titanic''. He may not have thought so; but thousands of his fans - mostly young girls - did: and a year after that blockbuster film, ``People'' magazine voted him among the world's 50 most beautiful people.

At 26, Leonardo DiCaprio often wishes he could get rid of tags like these. On the one hand, his perpetual boyish looks and patented squint-eyed smile, have made him one of the most charismatic stars since the 1950s : ``James Dean with a Walkman'', one critic called him recently, but he also echoed the downside: ``DiCaprio has shifted from giving performance to giving persona.''

Sometimes non-stop good looks can be a distraction. And when they go hand in hand with a film that is stunningly photographed in one of the most lovely locations in the world, you have critics complaining that they are getting ``lots of Leo'' - and little else. His new film ``The Beach'' which opens at various centres in South India on May 19, has been packing in the teenaged crowds, worldwide, even as it upped DiCaprio's own fee almost tenfold, from the just over $ 2 million he received for ``Titanic'' to $ 20 million. But critical acclaim has been hard to come by and the film has been panned precisely for its handsome feel: ``A novel turned into an MTV video'' was one comment. ``All of DiCaprio's charisma and the director's savvy are used to divert us from the fact that there's not much going on... the picture is a cocoon around DiCaprio'', wrote The New York Times. The Washington Post was equally uncharitable: ``Think of it as ``Peter Pan'' with machine guns... with Leonardo in the role of Tinker Bell''.

The fault possibly lay in the film's source material. The Alex Garland novel of the same name, became a best seller, in 1996 with its creepy and convoluted story about the quest of rootless Westerners for an exotic ``heaven on earth'' which they ultimately despoil with their drug- ridden culture of violence.

Once the makers (the regular trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and writer John Hodge) signed up DiCaprio for the main role of the young American backpacker on holiday in Thailand, they perforce had to soften the storyline, to accommodate his goody goody persona, leaving out the more bizarre sequences of psychedelic violence that the novel exploits for its shock effect.

DiCaprio is Richard, a drifter who ends up in a sleazy Bangkok hotel in search of kicks.

He says he is looking for ``something more visceral, more real''. Shortly before taking his own life, a loony Scottish `ganja' addict, ``Daffy'' ( Robert Carlyle of ``The Full Monty'') gives him a map to an idyllic island retreat, a truly utopian hideaway, inhabited by a small commune. Richard persuades his next door neighbours, a French twosome Francoise and Etienne (Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) to join him in his quest. The trio have to get past armed guards, leap over a 40-metre waterfall and swim across a shark infested sea before they find their paradise. It is inhabited by a motley crowd of settlers ruled with an iron hand by a woman (Tilda Swinton). `Life is beautiful' for some time - till our hero stumbles on vicious poppy growers in another part of the island. ``The characters who live in what they think is paradise - the beach - don't want anyone else coming and spoiling the land'', explains director Boyle whose earlier films were zany comedies like ``Trainspotting'' and ``A Life Less Ordinary'', ``When they are threatened by new arrivals they'll do anything, even resort to violence to protect paradise, that's one of the ironies of the story''.

Richard and his friends cavorting above and below the water makes for lush footage, lovingly captured by cinematographer Darius Khondji - but as screen writer John Hodge adds, ``The devil makes work for idle hands. There isn't enough to do there. There's a lack of moral fixtures which leads to all sorts of unpleasantness''.

The violence and the drug- trade-induced nastiness erupts to engulf the island hideout.... in sequences that recall the film's nod at diverse sources like Joseph Conrad's novel, ``The Heart of Darkness'', Francis Ford Copola's acclaimed film, ``Apocalypse Now'', and the book and film of William Golding's ``Lord of the Flies''. Less charitable viewers have likened this aspect of the film to a violent grafting of ``Peter Pan'' on ``The Blue Lagoon''.

If the end product remains watchable, it is due in no small measure to the pulling power of the lead star. He rescued the film in other ways too. When Thais protested that the shooting on the island resort of Phi Phi Leh near Phuket left the environment despoiled, even while the story portrayed their country as a haven for drug peddlers, it was DiCaprio's personal commitment to a clean environment that saved the day. Only a few weeks ago, he hosted the main American observation in Washington DC, of Earth Day, and briefly assumed the avatar of a newsman to interview President Clinton on his government's ecological initiatives.

The son of German-American ``hippy'' parents has come a long way since he first acted in an educational TV serial ``Romper Room'' at the age of five.

After bit parts in many other television soaps including `Santa Barbara', he captured the cinema-going public's attention with his arresting Oscar-nominated portrayal of the mentally challenged young boy in the 1993 Johny Depp starrer, ``What's Eating Gilbert Grape''.

Two years later, DiCaprio played his first adult role as the lone gunman alongside Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman in ``The Quick and The Dead''.

The film's fate matched its title - and it rapidly expired at the box office.

A new version of ``Romeo and Juliet'' with the setting updated to a modern day beach resort in California, found DiCaprio playing his first lead role, to mixed reviews.

It was his tragically romantic role in the 1997 film ``Titanic'' that propelled him to cult status with young audiences.

His follow-up film a year later, was a let down: as the sulking King Louis XIV in the new remake of ``The Man In The Iron Mask'', DiCaprio was eclipsed by other actors like John Malkovich and Gerard Depardieu.

``The Beach'', carping critics notwithstanding, can be trusted to bring film goers trooping back into the theatre, drawn by Leo's lodestone.

As he himself admits, he is not quite there and is still hoping to find his forte: ``The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it'', he confesses, ``It's a great outlet. I'm not sure who I am - it seems that I change every day!''.

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