But Boyle's indifference to the usual appeals to the audience were compromised in The Beach, possibly by 20th Century-Fox, possibly by DiCaprio. Hard to know, but what is clear is that at times the movie expects us to like this boy whose behavior is quite sketchy. He could be a hero only if finding the ideal stretch of white sand were a heroic quest. Otherwise the only point would seem to be to seduce us into justifying the means he takes to a tempting end and then to snap the travel brochure shut on our lolling tongues. (Irony overlaps with comedy, sometimes in terms of structure but usually in terms of the response it elicits, i.e., laughter, but can at the same time be quite punitive.) But the script ducks the hardball approach and ends up neither-nor.

There is one problem that The Beach shares with Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later that we can lay at Boyle's door, however: he likes showing a boy who becomes a man by survivalist means. (In A Life Less Ordinary it's at least presented in a comic-ironic mode, and McGregor never really catches up to Cameron Diaz, anyway.) 28 Days Later is a rat's nest of unexamined left-wing attitudes, but when Jim outwits his military executioners and heads back to the compound to kick some khaki butt, the movie is fighting itself. It plays out left-wing fears and fantasies--medical experiments are cruel and potentially catastrophic; modern industrial-consumerist society makes people miserable and it would be a blessing if it were destroyed; the military is full of psychos; women and blacks are eternal victims--and then presents a soft-spoken, tender-hearted boy who becomes a hero by gouging a soldier's eyes out with his thumbs.

To reach this point Boyle has to get Selena into a situation in which Jim must rescue her. (He even puts her in a dress, tossing away the role-switching that made them so appealing.) Then he has Jim resort to a means that makes no sense: letting the zombie soldier loose, turning the military compound into a haunted house, electrical storm and all. In his rage Jim acts in such a way that Selena thinks the time has come to kill him in a heartbeat, and yet his actions are what enable them to end up in an idyllic life in the lustrously green countryside. Though it's a trim, swift movie, by the end it's turned into some kind of misshapen semi-Biblical, hippie-dippie back-to-nature, anti-militaristic, anti-establishment revenge fantasy, and your embarrassment is matched only by your surprise that Jim and Selena's story isn't really ironic at all.

In all of Boyle's previous features, and in much of The Beach as well, Boyle looks on with unblinking and amused detachment as base human urges undo communities. In 28 Days Later he identifies original innocence for us, with Jim and Selena as the new, interracial Adam and Eve, and Hannah as their asexually produced offspring. It's the latest in progressive-primitive.