Trainspotting (1996)

One of the 1990's signature highlights in that amorphous genera known as independent film, Trainspotting was also the movie that marked for American viewers Danny Boyle as a director to watch. As we know from his later best picture Oscar winner Boyle is more then happy to take us into the slums, he's very capable with characters and environments on the margins, and in general is a director with interesting things to say and clever ways of saying them. Trainspotting is based on the novel of the same name by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, an concerns a group of young adult heroin addicts and associated economically poor hangers on in late 1980's Edinburgh. One of the interesting things about this film for me was recognizing some locations from a trip I took last summer to Scotland, there's also a scene in which by implication an American tourist is mugged, which thankfully did not happen to me.

The main character in the film is Mark "Rent Boy" Renton (Ewan McGregor in a strong early performance). At the beginning of the film Mark decides to give up heroin, however he seems to pretty consistently need "just one last hit", and sobriety doesn't take, that is until he's more or less forced to quite by tragic circumstances later in the film. This movies not in a hurry to get where its going, it just seems to wander around with a group of pathetic and tragic characters for a long while, but its always interesting, and always building even if you don't notice it at first. In addition to a few well known streets in Edinburgh Boyle's done some amazing location scouting, one slum apartment in particular standing out in its rotting depressingness.

Things happen to the characters in the film that mostly they are not equipped to handle, and mostly they fall back on drugs. There is the tragic death of a baby in this movie, a child that is introduced early on crawling around in the decayed flat its mother lives in. There is a hunting shot of this child dead in its cradle, mouth open, mother panicking and desperate for a hit of heroin because she just doesn't know how else to cope, the dead child returns in some of Mark's later detox, hallucinatory sequences, crawling towards him on the celling, also quite the haunting image. There are many characters and plots in this film and they climax in a wonderfully strange almost muted drug deal and aftermath. The cast is pretty large and contains fine performances from then up and coming Brits like Jonny Lee Miller and Kelly Macdonald. It's a fine film that evokes an almost documentary flavor as it penetrates its target sub-culture. Full of rich character pieces, dark humor, tremendous energy, and a plot which you consistently don't know where it will lead you. Probably still Boyle's masterpiece. ****