The late Moore, who left his native Ireland in his 20s to escape the church’s hold on all aspects of life there, is a pretty good argument for Greene’s famous contention that no one understands evil like a Catholic. “The Statement” is a steely, measured attack on the Church’s record against the Nazis. In one scene, an older priest tells a younger one, “One thing I will always believe is that we lost the war, not in 1940, but in 1945 … In 1940, under Maréchal Petain [the leader installed by the Nazis], France was given a chance to revoke the errors, the weakness and selfishness of the Third Republic … Under the Maréchal, we were led away from selfish materialism and those democratic parliaments which preached a false equality, back to the Catholic values we were brought up in: The family, the nation, the Church. But when the Germans lost the war, all that was finished.”

For Moore, it made perfect sense that an authoritarian body like the church would find much to admire in Nazism. But he wrote “The Statement” with the controlled outrage of someone who, no matter how far he has removed himself from the church, has never escaped its notion of sin. He records the priests and higher-ups who sheltered Brossard mouthing their pieties about Christian forgiveness, and you feel Moore’s disgust at what it is they are so willing to forgive. For Moore, the guilty clerics in his novel are stained by their willingness to rationalize the crimes of the past, and he writes as if to withhold his own absolution from them.

One would hope that a movie made from this novel might be a solid, exciting piece of muckraking that would stir up argument. The director, Norman Jewison, has always had an affinity for “social problem” pictures (never more entertainingly than in his 1967 “In the Heat of the Night”), and he’s assembled an amazing cast. Michael Caine plays Brossard, Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam, respectively, are the judge and colonel tracking him down, and Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, Frank Finlay and Ciarán Hinds all turn up.

But “The Statement” is a stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” is close to atrocious, with nearly every line being a piece of exposition or a statement of the movie’s themes. It’s not so much that Jewison has worked to make sure the movie doesn’t offend anyone (this material is bound to offend somebody) as that he proceeds mechanically, with half his attention on the machinations of the various factions hunting Brossard and half on the ideas of guilt and responsibility. We see a flashback to Brossard’s major crime, carrying out the execution of French Jews, in progressive bits and pieces, and each time Jewison returns to it the impact is lessened.

Most of the time, “The Statement” is one of those deadly pictures whose individual scenes consist mostly of watching men in suits talking in a room. Something has petered out in Jewison’s work. His previous picture, “The Hurricane,” was another potentially involving piece of muckraking that got hung up in the subtext about fathers and sons. “The Statement” is even more remote — and nobody connected with it seems to have noticed the strangeness of watching a predominantly English cast (Hinds is Irish) playing French people with English accents on location in France. (I giggled when Jeremy Northam donned one of those round, crowned hats worn by French officials, looking as if he were about to play Inspector Clouseau.)

No movie features a cast like this without providing at least some moments of good acting, though in each case it’s about what the actors are able to do in spite of their material. I don’t find it objectionable that the movie avoids the cliché of providing a romance between Northam and Swinton, but did that have to mean not even permitting them some nifty byplay? Northam, one of those actors it’s always a pleasure to see, at least provides a few notes of dry wit. Swinton is less off-putting than usual. Maybe she’s best in roles that require speed and impatience — the sharpness of her features translates well in playing a character who has to think on her feet. Charlotte Rampling manages to get some poignancy into the small role of Brossard’s estranged wife, a bedraggled proletarian cliché. The one all-out bad performance is from John Neville, whose dried-out, beady-eyed aristocratic air seems as inauthentic as always.

It’s amusing to open the newspapers to the ads for “The Statement” and read Jeffrey Lyons proclaiming, “Michael Caine is a revelation!” It’s taken 47 years of Caine’s film career for Lyons to have a revelation watching him act? What has he been watching all these years? Caine is severely limited by the thinness and stodginess of the script, and in some ways he’s miscast. Caine is basically too grounded and individual an actor to play a man so subservient. But he does something in “The Statement” that he’s never done before: He convincingly plays weakness. Brossard’s weakness isn’t the heart condition that forces him to pop nitroglycerin capsules and huff and puff whenever he exerts himself. It’s the weakness of the born follower, a man who willingly puts himself in the hands of authority, whether those of Vichy or the church.

Caine is well past the actorly vanity of caring whether or not he’s likable. He gets at the servile clamminess of Brossard, and in a better movie the performance might be more than the sketch it is here. Caine is an actor who clearly loves to work — even when he’s given a mucked-up vehicle to work in. Coasting on his reputation and his built-up audience affection just doesn’t seem to occur to him. His bag of surprises is far from empty.

The message of “The Beach,” both the movie and the book it’s based on, is that technology and other stuff you have to plug in have disconnected us from our true natures — but if we ever have the opportunity to let our freak flags fly, we must be prepared for the dark secrets we might unearth. For anyone who ever read “Lord of the Flies,” or even just the Cliffs Notes, that’s nothing we haven’t heard before.

But there’s always the possibility that a good director might elevate lackluster material. Boyle just doesn’t rise to the challenge. His “Beach” lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material’s tepidness. Instead, he now and then simply jabs electrodes into the movie to try to bring it to life, borrowing some of the quicksilver editing techniques and music-video hyperkinesis he used so beautifully in his brilliant second picture, “Trainspotting,” and in the highly underrated “A Life Less Ordinary.” “The Beach” lurches along, informed by a kind of forced lyricism — and even that seems to be driven mostly by all that white sand and blue water, the movie’s most resonant images (the handiwork of Darius Khondji, who also shot “City of Lost Children”).

Of course, on some level, “The Beach” is nothing more than a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Although he’s appeared in two pictures since “Titanic” — “The Man in the Iron Mask” and “Celebrity” — this is the first role he’s taken since superstardom tapped him with its mighty scepter. Not so long ago, DiCaprio was one of the finest and most exciting actors movie audiences could have hoped for, and on the basis of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “This Boy’s Life” alone, it will be a long time before I’m ready to give up on him.

But as Richard in “The Beach,” he does little more than strut around, pouting and frowning in his Phish wear. His character may not be particularly well written in the first place (the screenplay was adapted by Boyle’s longtime collaborator, John Hodge), but all of DiCaprio’s natural appeal is submerged here.

It doesn’t help much that the story, with its muddled modern moralism, goes nowhere fast. Richard is a footloose young American backpacker who arrives in Bangkok, clearly to check out its “otherness” and, with any luck, find himself in the process. In his cheap hotel he meets Daffy (Robert Carlyle, basically reprising his hothead role from “Trainspotting,” only this time making it cartoonish and grating), who tells him about an incredible secluded island, where a secret community of people live in natural harmony, sort of. He then entrusts Richard with a map, which Richard shares with the nice-looking French strangers in the room next door, Etienne and Frangoise (Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen, the French actress who’s shown a wonderful crispness in pictures like Benont Jacquot’s “A Single Girl” and Olivier Assayas’ “Late August, Early September,” but who has little to do here). The three set out to find the island together.

They finally reach it, and it ain’t easy: A glorious field of pot plants, fiercely guarded by a cadre of gun-toting natives, is just one of the obstacles. Once our three pilgrims have arrived, however, they become entranced by the allegedly content and enlightened group of tree-hugging, fish-spearing individuals who’ve settled there and the simple life they lead. (The pot guards allow them to stay on the island, on the condition that they don’t let anyone else in.) Of course, danger lurks — you might guess that in the way the group’s scary ringleader, the vaguely reptilian Tilda Swinton (wearing a bindi and other types of mysterious face paint, when what she could really use is a good mascara), refuses to let one poor sod go to the mainland to see a dentist. Instead, she allows the other island inhabitants to descend on him with glee, yanking out his bad tooth with a pair of pliers. Foreshadowing? You bet!

But we never understand why Richard and his friends are so taken with this community in the first place, other than the fact that the setting is idyllic. The island inhabitants are a faceless crew. The only one who stands out is Paterson Joseph as Keaty, who, beneath his dreadlocks, is English to the core — he’s still interested enough in civilization to keep up with the cricket scores.

These people are misguided innocents who are nice enough, but basically vapid, as if the movie thinks that’s the kind of community Today’s Youth Culture desires (and I don’t think it is). But there’s never enough tension in “The Beach” to make its major conflicts work. The temptation to give in to the more savage side of human nature — the struggle that Richard himself eventually faces, restaging his own private “Apocalypse Now” inside his muddled head — ends up being almost completely pointless, nothing more than a vehicle to drive us toward the movie’s climax.

And that, too, is woefully inert. In the book, at least you get a nice bloody skirmish. “The Beach” wouldn’t be a better movie if it were more visceral, more bloodthirsty, but it would at least make a little more sense. As it is, all we’re left to chew on are the age-old themes of man vs. nature, man vs. man and man vs. himself. Maybe it’s time he found some new opponents. Or at least started wearing longer pants.

Unlike “Happiness” (1998), which bludgeoned its audience with pathetic pedophiles and murders, “The War Zone” creeps up behind its audience and slits its throat. It’s coolly gorgeous and familiar — if cinematically formal — and the family appears strong and healthy at first. It’s easy to respond to them, which makes their secret even more devastating.

Actor Tim Roth (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Rob Roy”) says he was so moved by Stuart’s novel that he agreed to make his debut as a director with it. With Stuart adapting and Roth set on capturing the emotional experience of reading it, almost every part of “The War Zone” ends up uncomfortably ambiguous, from the way Jessie uses her sexuality to the exact nature of her relationship with her brother. With a subject as volatile as incest, ambiguity can be pretty difficult to appreciate. And perhaps predictably, the reviews in England, where the film opened, offered mixed statements of praise and censure. Roth, who is now bringing the film to the States, met me earlier this week in the lobby of the Rihga Hotel in New York to talk about that controversy, the way families work and the tiny details that make movies breathe.

Does the controversy over the movie in England surprise you?

I was warned that the British would go for us. I was not surprised. I was more worried that they would go for Freddie and Laura, or Ray, or any of the actors. But I was fortunate that they just went for me, which is fine.

Do you think that the American reaction will be different?

My experience with the film in America has been phenomenal.

Starting with Sundance?

Yeah, that was the first public screening. And there it was, and a woman stood up in the audience and talked about it afterward and said, “That is what happened to me, and that is what it feels like.”

How did you deal with that?

I was shocked, and then we talked. It was wonderful, and she did that in front of a huge audience, which I thought was remarkably courageous. It has changed my life. Americans have a way of talking about things that nobody else has.

You’re partnering with Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network for the opening here, which puts you at an odd confluence of art and activism.

It’s odd. I wanted to make a piece of cinema about something that makes me angry. I wanted to treat the subject in a cinematic way. We’re low budget, so we’re destined for the art house — fair enough. But it fights against itself. It’s not confusing to me, because I made it for me. But it is confusing. On one hand, it could be relegated to an issue movie, or whatever.

Which would be a shame.

It would be a shame. I wanted it to be a cinematic journey. And composition and lighting and what-have-you are very important to me.

You’ve said that you were happy with capturing the experience of the book, if not all the details. It’s out of print here, so I have to ask if there were details that you had to throw out that just killed you to do so?

No, it was a great experience. Working with Alex [Stuart, the novelist and screenwriter] was terrific, because we just rewrote the experience. [The book] was set in summer; there were tourists everywhere. I said, “Set it in winter — that will give you some new eyes.” Plus, I love the winter landscape, and that seemed to echo what was going on in their heads. For me, it was adapting the experience that I had when I was reading the book, you know, the feeling of these characters. But you do lose things that you love.

For instance?

Well, there were scenes that we shot, that were extraordinary, that had to go because they interrupted the rhythm. There’s a masturbation scene, with Tom. And it was a scene that I loved, because he hasn’t been destroyed yet. There’s a boy, doing a boy thing. But it also has a very disturbing undertone to it. It’s scary. I loved the scene, but it took us down a different path, and then we had to jump back on it. And so it had to go.

You’ve got this winter landscape, and this setting — near a turbulent ocean — and it’s fairly easy to identify the metaphor. But then there are some details that are much more subtle. I thought maybe I could get you to elaborate. To begin with, there’s a very strange use of focus, particularly at the beginning, where inanimate objects are in very tight focus and characters’ faces are not, they’re blurry.

It’s all a matter of taste. But also, when a nightmare is occurring, there’s a physical aspect to it. A ball can be a little bit too round. My nightmares as a kid were always just textural, color. They were never actually stories that happened in my dreams. I wanted to bring a bit of that into the film in a certain way.

There’s a scene in the kitchen where the butter dish is in focus, or shoes …

That’s mundane life, the ordinariness of it all. It’s the mechanics of life that we had to investigate to introduce the audience to this family. To get them, if we can, to sit at that table — always leave a chair empty for ‘em.

Another detail is that nudity is used in an interesting way, particularly the casual nudity around the house.

It’s inappropriate. That’s absolutely intentional. I remember going to houses, and seeing a dad walk through, and [thinking], “Fuck. Put some fucking clothes on.”

To other people’s houses?

Yeah, you know, ’60s generation, with hippie parents who were becoming accountants. That is a line that hasn’t been drawn, and I wanted that in the house. There’s something very wrong with that.

The line is drawn by each family in its own way. It’s individual choice. At what age is it inappropriate to take a bath with your child? It’s up for debate, but that is what is going on in that house. On top of which you have a hormonal, 16-year-old child who will see sex in a table lamp, because he’s at that point. And his initiation into sexuality is through his discovery of this monstrosity that is taking place. His sex life, his life — he is abused. His life has just been ruined by looking through a window.

What parts of your family experience did you bring to the film?

Well, my dad was working class and my mom was middle class, and I put that crossover in there. I like the noise of two different classes. My sister went to a posh school so she spoke differently. But that reflection is in the house. If you’re from England, you’ll know that the boy’s much more working class than the girl is, and that the dad is much more working class than the mom is. So we crossed the class divide. That’s about it.

What about with your own children?

Baby detritus. Baby stuff. Nappies. And shields that you put on your breasts to catch the milk. And, uh, everything that’s about new birth. Me and Tilda [Swinton, the mother] — because Tilda had just had twins — we became obsessed with the things that you never see in a film that are actually in your house, that you never thought would end up in your house.

I felt like there was an ambiguity with Jesse, with how much control she had, with how much of a victim she was. Is that …

There should never be confusion as to whether she’s a victim. If [her father] crosses the line, he crosses the line — even if he was invited. There’s no ambiguity in that, there’s black and white. Everything else is a gray area.

If your child goes to you and says, “I want to fuck you,” what do you do? I’m not saying that that happened — by the way — but some people see the film in that way. It’s up for interpretation. But do you cross the line? You’re an abuser. It’s straightforward.

As to her motivations, the way she handles it, that’s up for grabs. I left it very open, intentionally so.

I read that you shot a second ending. Did you take it out because it made the film less ambiguous?

I shot an ending that I felt was wrong. It was a specific conversation that takes place between the brother and the sister. It was in the book actually, in a very different way. But we all decided that it didn’t belong in this film.

Can you elaborate or tell me what happened?

No. And it’s really irrelevant: It gave the audience a pop psychology excuse.

Why was it important to you to avoid pop psychology, because the film never …

Because there is a lot of stuff that is spoken by victims who are in the media who offer you quick and easy solutions. I didn’t want to get involved with that stuff. I find it quite abusive. I think that those people need to go back to their therapists. If there were easy answers to any of this it wouldn’t exist.

“It’s a sick world,” Tom says. Do you agree?

It is for him.

But he says that before …

He’s a teenager. He’s also transplanted — he’s from London and he’s in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t like it. And it is a sick world, I suppose. I’m quite an optimist.

Are you?

Yeah.

Well, that shone through the film …

My feeling is that, my hope is, that they’ll get each other through this. For them, this has happened. We will work out our own ending, our own conclusion — if there is one. I’ve heard many, many versions, and I’m thrilled by it.