director
Danny Boyle
screenwriter
John Hodge
based on
the novel by
Irvine
Welsh
producer
Andrew Macdonald
cinematographer
Brian Tufano
music
Brian Eno
editor
Masahiro Hirakubo
cast
Ewan McGregor (Renton)
Ewen Bremner (Spud)
Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy)
Kevin McKidd (Tommy)
Robert Carlyle (Begbie)
Kelly Macdonald (Diane)
Peter Mullan (Swanney)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 94m
u.k.
release: February 23,
1996
u.s.
release: July 19, 1996
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other danny
boyle films
reviewed on this website:
- the
beach
- a
life less ordinary
- shallow
grave
- 28
days later
|
Trainspotting -- the book, the movie, the soundtrack,
the multimedia phenom (next comes the CD-ROM, no doubt) -- has
been likened to A Clockwork Orange, which also made hay
with British youth by being scandalous and "evil" in
the eyes of grown-ups. The book, at least, merits the comparison.
Irvine Welsh's anecdotal novel is alive with musical prose: "Ah
went to take a shot. It took us ages tae find a good vein. Ma
boys don't live as close tae the surface as maist people's. When
it came, ah savored the hit .... Take yir best orgasm, multiply
the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin miles off the
pace." Welsh's genius, like Anthony Burgess' in A Clockwork
Orange, was to sustain an alien dialect that first distances
you from the squalor and then, as you pick up more of the native
tongue, makes you feel like an insider for understanding words
like "tolchock" or "radge." The prose sucks
you in, makes you an honorary droog or junkie.
The movie Trainspotting inevitably loses much of Welsh's
linguistic power. But director Danny Boyle, like Stanley Kubrick
before him, tries the equivalent effect with images. When the
hero -- Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a spirited Edinburgh junkie
-- must sift through appalling toilet water in search of placebo
suppositories, Boyle has him sink into the toilet and swim through
an inky blue void. The result, both lyrical and repellently literal,
is a moment Kubrick might envy. Scene for scene, Trainspotting
isn't in the same league as Clockwork; its dramatic arc
is similar (Renton, like Alex, gradually reforms), but Boyle
doesn't seduce us into complicity with violence. The movie's
scariest character, the barroom brawler Begbie (Robert Carlyle),
strikes like a Scottish twister and is clearly seen as the border
between good dirty fun and a bad scene. Begbie would thrash all
four of Kubrick's droogs.
As rude and scatalogical as Trainspotting often is, it
represents a leap in maturity for Boyle and his scripter John
Hodge, who broke through in 1994 with the nasty Hitchcockian
doodle Shallow
Grave. That effort was so cold and remorseless it made
Blood
Simple look like Forrest
Gump, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, as if Begbie
had directed it. Trainspotting is lighter and more compassionate;
among its deeper merits is that it proves a movie doesn't have
to be mean to be fresh.
Trainspotting, the title, refers to a meaningless activity
meant to lend the illusion of structure to an aimless existence.
It's Welsh's metaphor for the addictive rituals of heroin. Most
of the young protagonists shoot up, but the movie isn't really
about heroin -- the drug could just as easily be moloko-plus
or mugwump juice. It's about the irony of youth being so averse
to societal cages -- "Choose life, choose a family, choose
a job" -- that they forge their own chains. Ewan McGregor,
whom I found insufferable in Shallow Grave, is much better
here; his Renton, confiding in us through sardonic narration,
is a serviceable heir to Malcolm McDowell's sly-fox Alex. We
like the little fucker, and we wish him well. Trainspotting
may only be the art-house flavor of the month, but McGregor and
Boyle make it tasty. |
