27 years later, it’s fascinating to peel apart the layers of the film that launched Danny Boyle’s career, especially considering the scope of work that would follow. He would go on to direct 28 Days Later (2002), one of the greatest zombie apocalypse films of all time, only eight years later. And then, of course, he’d take his success to even further heights, directing the Oscar-winning fan-favorite Slumdog Millionaire (2008), just six years after that. But these benchmarks are just a couple of the major highlights in his storied multi-decade career. Don’t forget about Sunshine (2007), the underrated sci-fi epic starring Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne. Or Steve Jobs (2015), the pitch-perfect biopic penned by The Social Network (2010) scribe Aaron Sorkin. Boyle has proven over the years that he can essentially direct any genre that strikes his fancy, more often than not to great success. But none of his films better encapsulates his style and sensibility than the brilliant Trainspotting (1996), which was the highest-grossing British film of 1996, and quickly became a huge international success.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
Perhaps the greatest testament to the original film’s enduring staying power is its legacy sequel, T2: Trainspotting, which came out in 2017 to mixed reviews. Some critics loved it; some didn’t feel that its existence was necessary, but it did surprisingly well at the box office. The film made its money back and did so without besmirching the legacy of the original film, which is much more than most legacy sequels can say for themselves. And the idea that an original I.P. from the ’90s could be so firmly embedded in the zeitgeist as to warrant a sequel 20 years later can’t be seen as anything but a cultural success. Revisiting the original film all these years later, it feels as energetic and exciting as it ever did. Packed wall-to-wall with whip-smart dialogue, fast-paced action sequences, ingenious camera tricks, and prescient socio-economic commentary, Trainspotting endures as an iconic and seminal 20th century British film.
The Cycle of Addiction
PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
The story centers on a group of deadbeat heroin addicts in Edinburgh, Scotland, with Renton (Ewan McGregor) at the heart of the crew. The other key figures are a gaggle of half-witted, but endlessly entertaining misfits. Spud (Ewen Bremner), a dopey fixture of the gang, is too stupid to be a successful addict, but too unmotivated to find anything better to do. Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), another integral member of the crew, is a ladies man who fancies himself a bit of a movie critic. The rest of the main crew consists of Tommy (Kevin McKidd), a nice but naive kid, and Begbie (Robert Carlyle), a truly malicious criminal that the guys can’t seem to shake. The story starts with a montage of quick cuts and music as Renton’s narration introduces his crew and his lifestyle.
After the opening montage it becomes clear that this crew, along with a woman called Alison (Susan Vidler) and her young baby, mostly just sit around and shoot up in an opium den run by a guy who calls himself Mother Superior (Keith Allen). But at this point in time, Renton gets bored and decides that he’s kicking heroin. He dips out and sets himself up with all the supplies necessary to do so. Hoping to smoothly wean himself off the drug, he inserts opium suppositories into his rectum, leading up to one of the more memorable and fecal scenes in the film. After kicking the drug, his libido returns, and he manages to go home with a snarky girl called Diane. She makes him sleep on the couch after they have sex, and he realizes only in the morning that he’s slept over at her parents’ house, and that she’s still in high school.
It’s not long before Renton and his friends are back on drugs, relying on robbery and petty theft to supply the funds necessary to keep up their habit. In this hazy period, the film’s darkest tragedy occurs. Alison finds her baby dead in her crib, having been neglected for several days. It’s a dark reminder of the reality which these addicts are avoiding by burying their heads in the sand. Another reality check occurs when Spud and Renton, having just robbed someone, get chased down and arrested by the police. Spud takes the fall and serves six months in jail, while Renton is given probation and forced to rehabilitate. But of course, the rehab-supplied methadone isn’t enough, and Renton sneaks off for another hit almost immediately. He excitedly overindulges, nearly overdoses, leaving his parents with no choice; they lock him in his childhood bedroom and force him to withdraw under their watch. Looking to turn over a new leaf once he’s clean, Renton moves to London and becomes a real estate agent. But his old life comes knocking in the form of Begbie. On the lam, he takes refuge in Renton’s apartment, and causes nothing but misery in his wake.
Shortly thereafter, Sick Boy and Spud make their way to London and recruit Renton and Begbie or one last harebrained scheme. They go in on buying two kilos of heroin for a low price with the intention of flipping it to a dealer for five times the value. The dealer haggles them down a bit, but the sale goes off without a hitch otherwise. Renton waits until everyone has fallen asleep, grabs the bag full of money, and runs away. He leaves a small sum for Spud in a security deposit box, but hangs the other two out to try. He vows to finally join society and start leading a normal life for once.
High Brow and Low Brow
One of the things Trainspotting does best is weave lowbrow humor with highbrow cultural criticism and discussions of late capitalist minutiae. The lowbrow gags start early, with the aforementioned suppository scene. But there’s another scene later on in which Spud gets himself into some feces-related trouble as well. After a night out drinking, Spud goes back home with his girlfriend Gail. She’d been trying to hold out sex from him in an attempt to build a more well-rounded relationship, but she decides to throw caution to the wind. As she tries to get some action going, she realizes he’s way too drunk to do anything of the sort. She leaves him passed out alone in her bed. In the morning he wakes up and realizes he’s pooped himself. Trying to cover up his embarrassing blunder, he wraps up the sheets and attempts to sneak them out of the house unnoticed. But on the way out, Gail’s mother stops him and tries to politely take the sheets away.
A tug-of-war ensues until Gail’s mother pulls hard, sending feces flying all around the room. It’s not hard to see the gag coming, but it’s a hilarious mess that hits every time. And while these dirty little vignettes aren’t crucial to the overall plot, they add a unique kind of texture to the tapestry film. Perhaps its greatest strength, the film is able to weave together comedy, tragedy, action, and resonant social commentary with ease, all working to portray a slice of real life and the myriad emotions experienced within.
After Renton kicks heroin for the first time, he goes out for a day in the park with Sick Boy. They smoke cigarettes and chat, using binoculars and the scope of a BB gun to spy on people in the park. All the while, Sick Boy goes on with his theory about how the world works. As he sees it, most people really only have a small window of success before they become irrelevant and boring. Even greats like Lou Reed and David Bowie only have a precious few years of true success. Renton retorts that some of Lou Reed’s solo stuff isn’t too bad, to which Sick Boy responds: “No, it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. And in your heart you kind of know that although it sounds all right, it’s actually just sh*te.” It’s an astute point for a deadbeat junkie, but Renton doesn’t buy it. It’s surely a pessimistic view of art, and it’s one that the movie aims to dispel to some degree.
When Renton overdoses later on in the film, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” plays over the sequence to great effect. It’s a gorgeous song that’s perfectly ironic in context, and just so happens to come from Transformer, one of Reed’s solo albums. A different joke on the same theme occurs later, when Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s collaboration “Nightclubbing,” from Pop’s solo album The Idiot, plays softly in the background in Mother Superior’s den. And of course, the film’s opening scene is set to “Lust for Life,” Iggy Pop’s most famous solo song of all time. Sick Boy’s fascination with James Bond movies is another clever engine for cultural commentary throughout the film. These characters might be scheming addicts, but they have a knack for punching above their weight in casual conversation. At one point, Sick Boy monologizes about Bond girls for no apparent reason: “Ursula Andress, the quintessential Bond girl. That’s what everyone says. The embodiment of his superiority over us. Beautiful, exotic, highly sexual and totally unavailable to anyone apart from him. Sh*te. Let’s face it. She can shag one punter from Edinburgh, she’d shag the whole lot of us.” It’s a great snapshot of the movie’s essence: pop culture, sex, gender politics, humor, and lowbrow parlance.
Visual Ingenuity
Miramax
What truly elevates the film time and time again is Boyle’s signature visual style. The opening sequence, similar to his previous film Shallow Grave (1994), is a fast-paced montage that sets the tone for the film right off the bat. This sequence is even better than his previous effort, adding in more tracking shots and bigger stakes. All quick cuts full of running and jumping, the montage introduces the main characters, the setting, and the overall vibe of the story in one concise motion.
Equally important is how the narration establishes the ethos of the film: “Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fing big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f** you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fed up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”
Boyle cleverly uses visuals to enhance the film all throughout, like in the aforementioned suppository scene. When Renton reaches into the toilet to retrieve his opium pills, he ends up putting his whole body inside the bowl, his legs swirling around on the way down. He swims down to the bottom, retrieves the pills, and then comes back to reality. To achieve this effect, Boyle positioned the camera in profile, and used a prop toilet which had been cut in half, attaching a wooden chute underground. The crew shot the underwater sequence in a nearby pool, creating a circle of light to mimic a toilet above Ewan’s head. Later on in the film, when Renton overdoses, the camera follows him as he sinks down into the carpet.
The scene was shot on a soundstage with a false floor, allowing him to sink seemingly underground after taking a dangerous hit of heroin. The camera stays in his perspective as Mother Superior, his heroin dealer, carries him outside. Boyle cleverly positions the rug around the camera lens, putting the viewer in Renton’s POV as he sinks deeper into his heroin coma. After this fateful overdose, Renton’s parents force him to withdraw from the stuff, and the subsequent sequence features some of the finest visuals in the film. Boyle employs the famous zolly technique, in which the camera zooms forward while dollying backwards at the same time, or vice versa, giving the viewer a kind of vertigo sensation. In this case, it helps convey the terror of withdrawal-induced hallucinations. A shocking horror, Renton sees Alison’s dead baby crawling on the ceiling towards him.
Coming Full Circle
Although it takes several failed attempts and relapses, Renton finally manages to create some kind of hopeful future for himself at the end of the film. As he walks away with the stolen money and a big smile on his face, he vows to finally live a normal life. He repeats some of the opening monologue of the film, finally resigning to choose life and embrace the monotony of existence. After all the trouble he’s been through, the idea of this kind of normalcy sounds like a fever dream. Maybe he’ll figure it out, or maybe he’ll never be able to escape the cycle. Either way, it feels like a quintessential ’90s message, speaking to a generation of rebellious youths who have likewise resigned to live normal lives in spite of their counter-cultural aspirations.
It’s undoubtedly a similar ending to Boyle’s debut film Shallow Grave, in which Ewan McGregor’s character Alex gets away with the money as well. Despite tons of questionable choices throughout the film, the viewer roots for Renton just like they rooted for Alex. He’s managed to make mistakes and still emerge victorious at the end of the film in spite of it all. And that’s what Trainspotting does best. It’s a true slice-of-life film, aiming to embody the full spectrum of existence. The darkness and the light. The laughs and the fecal matter. The wins and the losses. Renton’s journey through hell is a remarkably human story of perseverance and folly. And because of the clever direction and script, it’s a blast too.
