In 1997 there came a little movie called Trainspotting, adapted by director Danny
Boyle and scenarist John Hodge from Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s novel of the
same name. It was the loose-limbed story of a group of childhood friends
spinning their collective wheels in the working-class gloom of Edinburgh,
Scotland, scheming schemes, committing petty crimes, arguing the merits of Sean
Connery (and, by extension, Scotland) and trying to sustain those decaying
friendships all while rotating in and out of a seemingly hopeless cycle of heroin
addiction, indulgence and withdrawal. For me, Trainspotting’s exuberant, hyperkinetic style decorated a somewhat
sensationalistic attitude toward tragedy, on a sociopolitical as well as
personal scale, and its scabrous energy always seemed too much at odds with the
overwhelming lethargy which follows the orgasmic relief of a desperately needed
hit. (I guess I’m more of a Panic in Needle
Park kind of guy.)
But what do I know? The movie ended up becoming a smash hit
in the UK, and a sizable one in the US as well. Many have asserted in the 20
years since it was released that Trainspotting,
the movie, was a generation-defining event, and perhaps in Scotland it was. But
in terms of its general reception I think it’s more likely, more broadly and more
simply a matter of Trainspotting having
provided one of those points of demarcation in terms of the vicarious allure of
the movies over any shared life
experience, in seeing what films specifically end up being, in the
market-driven zeitgeist of modern movie-going, the campfire a generation
gathers around, which ones carry collective, sometimes slippery, even
indefinable meaning for a generation, in the same way that Clockwork Orange or Star Wars
or Top Gun or Pulp Fiction did.
Judging by the reaction of the opening night audience in
Hollywood for T2 Trainspotting, the much-anticipated sequel to the 1997 film
which reunites the director, writer (of screenplay and novel), and the entirety of the original cast, whatever that
meaning might be it runs deep—the reintroduction of each familiar character
inspired the same sort of cheering and applause that was part and parcel of nostalgia-ready
audiences getting their first taste of Star
Wars: The Force Awakens. And one of the new movie’s most undeniable
attractions is in not only in revisiting these excellent actors in these particular
roles—they are to a man and woman better than ever-- but in seeing what 20
years has done to them and for them, and of course comparing their own progress
to our own.
But as it has been suggested, nostalgia ain't what it used to be. From the first frames Boyle effortlessly
recharges, amplifies and recharacterizes the energy that propelled the first
film— the nihilistically-tinged forward movement for movement’s sake of our
introduction in 1997 to Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), laughing after being hit
by a car, running aimlessly from the consequences of some unseen crime, is
replaced here by Renton, now 20 years older, making the same mad dash to
nowhere, but this time he’s on a treadmill in a franchise gym in Amsterdam, and
this time he’s laid out not by an unfortunate driver but instead a heart
attack. The suddenness of Renton’s spill generates a laugh, but as with most of
the comedy in Boyle’s Trainspotting
movies there’s no laughter in the strange stillness that follows. And with that
slapstick fall the consequences of the past have only begun to come home to
roost.
Renton’s own brush with death compels him to face up to the
life he’s been running from for two decades. He returns to Edinburgh ostensibly
to comfort his father in the wake of his mother’s passing, but more pointedly
to confront those old friends and to somehow make amends (or maybe just assuage
his own guilt) for having left them in the Edinburgh lurch and betraying them
by making off with the cash from a drug deal robbery at the end of the first
film. Those reunions, prickly and dangerous, form the foundation for the second
film’s richer, more reflective and certainly more emotionally resonant
strategy.
We first catch up with the only one of the four friends
still using skag, Spud (Ewen Bremner), who’s stuck in a downward spiral of
meaningless jobs, fruitless drug rehabilitation and desperation to stay
connected to his ex-wife (Shirley Henderson) and their young son. Renton
unwittingly interrupts Spud’s attempt at an honorable suicide, an act which
puts Spud yet again at the embarrassed mercy of an ill-timed eruption of body
fluids, T2’s most potent, riotously
funny nod to the comedy of horrors that was the first film’s stock in trade.
Renton’s attempted reconciliation with Sick Boy (Jonny Lee
Miller), now grown-up enough to at least go by his given name, Simon, doesn’t
go much smoother. Simon is scratching out a living managing a run-down pub on
the edge of a bad patch of urban-industrial wasteland, making ends meet by
blackmailing local hotshots with the help of his Bulgarian expatriate girlfriend
Veronica (Anjela Nedyalkova, who might be Eastern Europe’s answer to Marisa
Tomei), and he’s still seething over Renton’s betrayal-- their tentative mutual
assessment goes from distanced small talk to a violent brawl in a scary flash.
Kelly MacDonald makes a welcome, although all-too-brief appearance as Diane, now a lawyer whom Renton consults when Simon’s blackmail schemes get him arrested. When she first appeared, the audience cheered MacDonald as if she were the movie’s equivalent of Carrie Fisher returning as Princess Leia. Unfortunately, the movie has no idea what to do with Diane-- she’s escaped the drudgery of working-class Edinburgh only to function chiefly as a measuring stick for Renton’s self-ascribed failure of purpose.
But the elephant in the room (one of them, anyway) is, of
course, Begbie (Robert Carlyle), incarcerated for most of the 20 years in
between the first movie and this new one, whose improbable escape from a prison
hospital and even more improbable return to the Edinburgh home where his wife
and son live, with no apparent worry of being tracked down by police, coincide
with Renton’s visit home. Begbie has no idea his bete noire, the seething focus of 20 years’ worth of self-righteous
rage, is back in town, but you and I, and Boyle and Hodge, know that it’s only
a matter of time before the psychopathic Scot, whose accent is so impenetrable that
Boyle sometimes accompanies his rants with stylish subtitles, finds out about
Renton’s return. And when he does Begbie demands his due like the worst, most
vile demons of the past usually do.
The other elephant—heroin— gets plenty of attention as it
pertains to Spud’s painful and persistent struggle to ignore the craving in his
veins, and Bremner does a brilliant job here conveying Spud’s sense of
ultimately being alone in that struggle. He knows that, though Simon is still a
cokehead, he and Renton seem to have conquered, or at least tamed their
addiction to skag, just another aspect of his life that makes Spud feel as
though he’s been left behind. But T2
seems mysteriously reticent when it comes to seriously addressing how heroin
addiction was once the central fabric and motivation of Renton and Simon’s
lives as well. They tentatively warm to each other, but the specter of betrayal—financial
and, as it turns out, sexual—leads to further tension and a reacquaintance with
the needle. But as it plays in the course of the movie that reacquaintance is
apparently a casual one, and the subject is dropped (for the moment anyway)
almost as soon as it is introduced, as if a heroin shot at this point were nothing
more than a weekend backslide into bad habits with no more consequence than a
bad hangover—a curious misstep for a movie of such surprising empathy and introspection
to make.
“You’re a tourist in your own youth,” snarls Simon to Renton midway through the movie, and it’s the sort of self-reflective joke that the movie traffics in to near profound effect. Renton comes back home facing a newly minted sense of mortality and a need to come to some kind of terms not only with his own actions and how they’ve affected his friends, but also with his own sense of torpor, of being saddled by the implications of a rosy diagnosis of health and 30 more years of life coming just at the point when he’s become reacquainted with the desperate aimlessness which has always clung to the edges of his life. Yet the key to T2’s effectiveness is how deeply it understands that Renton’s desperation to reconnect with and reassess his past is shared by its audience. A sequel by definition, promises more of the same, and Boyle’s impish sense of play, refined here into a style far more sophisticated than the one he was honing in 1997, imparts that necessary sense of familiarity.
But T2 becomes its own animal, imbued with the strange, inharmonious mingling of exuberance and melancholy which can only be transmitted through age and experience, by a consideration of the fear of what might happen when another sort of needle drops, into the grooves of the old vinyl Iggy Pop album still sitting in Renton’s bedroom after all these years. It’s a fear acknowledged by the movie’s exhilarating, and horrifying, final shot, which carries chilling echoes from the first film, and it’s one that is ultimately honored by the movie’s commitment to Renton and company as fleshed-out individuals, not simply as snarling attitudes and generational signposts. At the end of T2’s nearly two-hour run, there’s no simple reassurance when the final train pulls out of the station right on time. Those 30 years still lie in wait.
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