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Trainspotting
The blackly comic tale of a motley crew of Edinburgh heroin addicts and Mark Renton's escape to (hopefully) a better life was the funniest, bleakest British film of the 1990s
Before its release, the second film from the Shallow Grave team had the chattering classes panicking about the glamorisation of drugs. They needn't have worried. This brutally honest and bitterly funny depiction of life on smack is a definite drugs turn-off. Hitting the ground running, Trainspotting keeps the pace heady. The first half of the film is really a series of masterful vignettes. We meet Renton (McGregor) and his 'friends' - Connery-obsessed Sick Boy (Miller), the pathetic Spud (Bremner), and Begbie (Carlyle), whose performance as the drunken, psychopath Begbie, is powerful, disturbing - and devastatingly true-to-life. The story really gets going when the boys attempt the drug-deal of a lifetime, which inevitably leads to double-crossing and betrayal, and destroys their tenuous friendship, with Renton ironically using the drug that previously owned him to move on to a better, drug-free existence. The highs and the lows of Renton's crew are adeptly and movingly chronicled. And blending gritty realism with stylistic psychedelia, director Boyle doesn't shy away from either extreme. Verdict A contemporary classic. |
