When Voltaire wrote Candide, he intended to lampoon the idea that everything happens for the best. What he ended up with was a different mantra, one that, if not necessarily optimistic, at least gave human beings a mission: to cultivate their own gardens. Some have interpreted this to mean that one must leave the world behind.

Whether Rumaan Alam was thinking of Voltaire when he wrote his novel Leave the World Behind, I can’t say. But the Netflix film adaptation, released this month and produced by former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, makes me think that to the filmmakers, Voltaire is as jolly as Santa Claus.

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The film opens with an affluent New York City family preparing to spend a weekend away on Long Island. The mother, Amanda Sandford, complains that she hates people and needs to “leave the world behind” for a bit. (She has clearly never read Neil Gaiman, who wrote that “wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”)

So Amanda and her husband and two teenagers shlep to the beach for a change of scenery. They arrive at “Point Comfort,” where eerie music and sidelong camera angles alert us that something is about to go wrong.

First, it’s the oil........

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