Trainspotting – Review

Trainspotting

with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremer, Johnny Lee Miller
Written by Irvine Welsh
Directed by Danny Boyle
by Kieran Cullen

The grimly comic Trainspotting is the second-highest grossing British movie of all time after Four Weddings and A Funeral, but don’t expect any market-tested “Made In the UK” nonsense á la Hugh Grant. Culled from Irvine Welsh’s ground-breaking novel, this ambivalent tale of heroin addiction amid the self-contained projects of east Edinburgh provides a lust for life no summer blockbuster can muster. It’s also sad, bitter and offers no moral compass to ease the confusion.

Although Trainspotting has become a brand itself – Welsh’s newfound fame catapulted his other books onto the bestseller lists, the cult set off by the film has spawned a rash of fashion T-shirts, and the movie’s soundtrack has even broken previously unheard of bands such as techno gurus Wonderworld – there are no postmodern signposts in the film itself. For the group of quasi-friends surviving from hit to hit, there are precious few images or icons, worthy or not, guaranteed to impassion their pale, thin bodies. The nearest “Trainspotting” has to a protagonist, the philosopher-addict Mark Renton (“I chose not to choose life. I chose something else.”), extends his brand loyalty only as far as the next visit to his smack patron, Mother Superior. By day, there is simply “robbin’, stealin’ and fuckin’ people over.” Rents’ other interests include only Iggy Pop and sex. For his feline sidekick Spud (Ewen Bremner) there is only the slight prospect of sex sometime in the future. The blonde predator Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) has a Sean Connery/ James Bond fixation, but is otherwise content-free. Even the motif of Scottish pride is eschewed; the characters shun any concept of north-of-the-border nationalism. Rents (played brilliantly by Shallow Grave veteran Ewan McGregor) remarks the Scots “were colonized by wankers.” The Edinburgh Festival is of relevance to this crew only as an opportunity to beat the living shit out of a touring Yankee and divvy up the proceeds from his stolen wallet. This isn’t Rob Roy or Braveheart. And the accents are better, even if Miramax dubbed them.

As the movie opens, the trio are attempting to kick heroin. This happens a lot. As befitting the brand leader position bestowed upon heroin in the film, the drug scenes lavish great detail on the mechanics of “shooting up,” the orgasm-and-then-some rush of the high, the flipside agony of withdrawal and the specter of death, for junkie and innocent bystander alike. Just Say No Messages wouldn’t fit anywhere in this film, a state of affairs which infuriated its British critics who bemoaned the lack of “values” (and the predictable reflecting-mirror defense of its admirers). The film refuses to preach, deriving its manic energy from the paradox of heroin’s pain and pleasure. As Rents says: “There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”

There are other distractions. The vicious sociopath Begbie (Robert Carlyle), who disdains smack but demands the loyalty of its addicts to fuel his profane Hard Man fantasies, provides most of the film’s violence. Rents, Spud and Sick Boy go along even though they hate Begbie, making fun of him behind his back, because what the fuck else is there to do? Begbie’s proficiency with pool cue and smashed glass, his rantings and pseudo-lectures, are enough to push Rents back into the arms of heroin.

Trainspotting is essentially structureless (as befits the British hobby, watching locomotives and hoarding train numbers), director Danny Boyle following the characters as they freefall through Thatcherite Britain. As Rents survives incarceration by his well-meaning but utterly clueless parents, a brush with the law (Spud, typically, goes down) and an embarrassing sexual encounter with schoolgirl Diane, he is the only character confronted with the reality of choice. Eager to escape the nightmares of home, he lands a job as a low-rent realtor in boom-town London, where Sick Boy and Begbie soon arrive to wreck his rehab. But Rents never comes up against the deadly consequence of his addiction. It is his friend Tommy, once an iron-pumping exemplar of healthy heterosexuality, who takes the funeral fall once Rents allows him a shot in the arm. Rents and the rest stick around back home until a major drug deal returns the entire gang to London for the final denouement of their tatty relationships.

Trainspotting serves up its black humor not in doses but as a matter of course, the everyday ironies of a junkie’s life. The more obviously lighter scenes don’t allow a full bellyache but the darker ones are tinged with humor, too. Rents’ pursuit of two opium suppositories (supplied by drug dealer Mickey Forrester in a cameo appearance from Welsh) dropped into “The Worst Toilet in Scotland” is a hallmark – both stomach-churning and utterly hilarious, much like the entire film. As Rents says, “People think it’s all about misery and desperation and death and all that shit, which is not to be ignored. But what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”