Trainspotting

9.5/10  - Directed by Danny Boyle - 1996 - 93 minutes

“Choose life.” These are the first words a young Ewan Macgregor speaks to the audience inTrainspotting (1996), a sardonic rejection of a conventional consumer life that haunts the rest of the film. Macgregor’s words, spoken in the voice of addict Mark Renton, become a desperate push to embrace the simple material life as he becomes increasingly unsatisfied with his life of drug dependency. Following the height of the “Just Say No” drug sentiment, director Danny Boyle subverts the ignorance of the 80’s anti drug lectures. The film uses its sense of humor as a means of opposing oversimplification and ignorance on addiction. In Trainspotting, deplorable characters are allowed to have heart, and addiction is not a moral failure but rather as the product of upbringing, environment and social decay.  

Trainspotting exists in a bleak and absurd, urban decay-filled portrait of post-Thatcher Edinburgh. In response to the economic depression that surrounds them, Renton and his friends Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller), Begbie (Robert Carlyle), Tommy (Kevin McKidd) and Spud (Ewen Bremner) reject the monotony of employment and instead enjoy criminal misadventures, all while Renton, Sick Boy and Spud depend on heroin to produce the pleasure and satisfaction in their lives. The film is a staple of 90's low budget cinema: vivid colors, heavily stylized cinematography and grimy indoor shots. Boyle and cinematographer Brian Tufano’s efforts to create a film largely revolving around drugs succeeded spectacularly; the surrealist twinge of the film and influence of the distorted figures of Francis Bacon on Boyle’s artistry come through in stylistic (often comic) angles and framing and over exaggerated colors. Boyle brilliantly creates a world that is vibrantly derelict, a setting that mirrors the impact of heroin on Renton. The setting fits into a darkly ironic truth of addiction; characters who use drugs as a means of escapism from their depressed, decaying area of Edinburgh, are ultimately plunged further into misery and find themselves in even greater decrepitude. The decaying apartments, buildings (and occasionally public toilets) of Trainspotting express the disarray of the character’s lives. 

The kind of grimy joy that Renton and his friends experience is temporary. The euphoria of heroin is accompanied by the horror of the crew having neglected their health and lives; as Renton and his friends become more dependent, the world around them begins to fall apart, as exemplified by the infant who dies for neglect in his friend’s apartment, or Tommy, whose addiction begins with drugs provided by Renton, fatally contracting HIV from his drug use. After being forced to go cold turkey in a powerful, visceral sequence that has Renton locked in his childhood bedroom, he is compelled to find work in London, “choosing life,” as it were. However when he has to return home for Tommy’s funeral, he’s brought into a high stakes heroin deal by his friends, requiring him to relapse to test the product. While the deal is a success, the film ends on a bleak note, as Renton has stolen the profits from his friends and walks away grinning, repeating his “Choose life” monologue from the start of the film as an announcement that he will embrace the career driven, consumer life. The “choose life” monologue is a particularly brilliant device in this film; Renton’s duplicity, anguish and many paths to a tragic death as a heroin addict are ultimately traded for survival, which, for him, means a place in the grim monotony of modern capitalism. Of all the many excellent scenes in Trainspotting, this bittersweet acceptance of survival in a life of drudgery is the most poignant. As for the film in a general sense, while admittedly not for the weak-stomached viewer, Trainspotting is, in all of its unflinchingly raw, brutal glory, an essential masterpiece.