This certainly isn't a travel brochure. Rarely has the underbelly of youth angst, manipulation and degradation been so frighteningly explored as it is in Danny Boyle's modern classic Trainspotting. Yet it is also visually explosive and oddly hilarious too. So confident and unabashed is Irvine Welsh's source material, that it allows for the tremdendous highs of addiction to clash directly with the chilling lows. The end product is disturbing and audacious.
The movie is set in Scotland, in a place where everyone's accents are so thick you'd need to melt them on a spoon over a flame to understand them. Once the dialogue has settled though, it absolutely sparkles. Great dialogue scenes featuring the lead character Mark (Ewan McGregor) include when he locks himself in his room to try to kick his habit and he rattles off a grocery list of essentials as if they were all the only things he needed or required; his conversation with Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) about Sean Connery; his attempts to woo the saucy Diane (Kelly Macdonald). In fact, most of the scenes simply ooze with fresh and often ironic dialogue -- it's no wonder the movie spawned a successful play run.
No real attempts at plot are made here, although there are some amazing characters, most notably the brash and psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and the woeful Spud (Ewen Bremner). We start to see how drugs become a way of life for the disillusioned and a ritualized form of community is observed. Illness, conflict and, more importantly, two traumatic deaths, serve as constant reminders that their shared hobby can also have severe consequences. Yet the tone never hits preaching velocity. I can imagine the film's ambiguities translate differently for different people.
In light of this, Trainspotting ably paints many different pictures and employs seemingly unending visual techniques to display them, but never calls for opinion. As with the dialogue, the visuals are unforgettable too: Mark Renton's trip through the depths of a toilet, Spud's nightmarish morning-after accident with the sheets at his girlfriend's house, Mark's torturous withdrawal from heroin in a room locked by his own parents, and his subsequent relapse where his next hit sends him sinking into the carpeted floor and straight on to the hospital. The latter is the most striking visual of them all. Danny Boyle's relentlessly innovative direction in these scenes is unforgettable. He sometimes freezes the action, or speeds up everything around one character, or makes objects bigger and smaller than they really are. It's a sort of Alice in Wonderland of our times.
The soundtrack is particularly good. In each scene it taps just the right mood, from Brian Eno and Lou Reed to Elastica and Blur.
There is constantly excessive language, sporadic violence, and even the drug use scenes are difficult to watch. But Trainspotting isn't about the joys of growing up or about morality tales, it shows what happens after we reject our surroundings because they're uninteresting or unrewarding. Maybe this explains why the one character with a relatively good head on their shoulders is the young schoolgirl Diane. What will happen when she hits Renton's age?
