In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Movies are sometimes accused of making drug use look glamorous, but that charge certainly can’t be leveled at Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, in which heroin addicts live in squalor, lose control of their bowels, do time in prison, become infected with HIV, and that’s not even the worst of it. Adapted from Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel of the same name, Trainspotting is equal parts horrifying and hilarious, one mood setting up the other in the way that a good horror comedy winds you up with scares to amplify the release of tension through laughter.
We first meet central character Renton (Ewan McGregor) in Leith, a working-class suburb of Edinburgh (the film was mostly shot in Glasgow, however). It’s the late 1980s and he’s in rebellion against everything he’s been told to do—“choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television…”—and chose heroin instead. Renton hangs out with a group of friends, each carefully delineated with a central characteristic as if they were musicians in a boy band: Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is a violent psycho, Spud (Ewen Bremner) is a doofus, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) is a James Bond fanatic, and Tommy (Kevin McKidd) is a clean-living footballer.
Renton, the most intelligent of the group, tries several times to quit. One such attempt leads to an amazing sequence of magical realism as he dives into “the worst toilet in Scotland” to retrieve two opium suppositories. The revival of his sexual instincts (suppressed, along with his digestive system, while he was shooting up), results in his sleeping with an underage girl (Kelly Macdonald, making a strong impression in her film debut), who proceeds to threaten to inform the police if he doesn’t continue the relationship. Renton then enters a methadone program, which has the benefit of keeping him out of jail when the gang is caught shoplifting (how do you think they managed to buy all the drugs they were consuming?).
After he nearly dies from an overdose, Renton’s parents lock him in his childhood bedroom to quit cold turkey, which produces some of the scariest nightmares you’ll ever see on film. He then moves to London and becomes a successful real estate broker, which is to say he found a socially-acceptable use for his talents as a scammer. But nothing attracts down-and-outer friends as much as one of their number becoming successful, and it all comes to a conclusion as madly hilarious and excruciatingly sad as the rest of the film, and that’s as much as anyone could ask for a film about a bunch of guys who never could get it right.
Rewatching Trainspotting after almost 30 years, it’s as funny and awful as I remember, and the visuals (cinematography by Brian Tufano, costume design by Rachel Fleming, production design by Kave Quinn, art direction by Tracey Gallagher) are as impressive as ever. The social satire hit me harder this time, however—the story begins in the last years of Margaret Thatcher’s dismantling of Britain’s national industries, which helps explain why none of these able-bodied young men seems capable of getting a job. They were never meant to be included in the new British society where everyone’s supposed to make it on their own, but advantages of birth and connections play a huge role in who actually succeeds. If that sounds to you like the direction America is heading, well, that’s something we agree on. And honestly, even rule-followers like me have our moments of rebellion against the demands to fit in and bow the knee to the almighty power of capitalism, we’re just better at making accommodations so we can hold a reasonable job and live a life of our choosing offstage. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1204
Technical details: 94 min.; color; screen ratio 1.85:1; English.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (1 disc).
Extras: audio commentary with Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and Ewan McGregor; nine deleted scenes with commentary; interview with production designer Kave Quinn and costume designer Rachael Fleming; making-of documentary; looking-back documentary; documentary about the soundtrack; teaser and trailer; booklet with essays by Graham Fuller and source novel author Irvine Walsh and glossary of terms from the novel.
Fun Fact: During his 1996 presidential campaign, Senator Bob Dole criticized Trainspotting and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for promoting “the romance of heroin.” Far from being upset, Irvine Welsh, author of the source novel Trainspotting, credited Dole’s remarks with helping to publicize his book and the film in the U.S.
Parting Thought: The “Choose Life” anti-drug campaign in Scotland was contemporaneous with the “Just Say No” campaign in the United States and both share a sort of ridiculously inadequate understanding of the issues involved. Were such slogans motivated by pure naiveté or was something more sinister at work?
