Sunday Classics: Trainspotting

Trainspotting is the movie that introduced me to independent and foreign cinema, not to mention the amazing music of Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. And, of course, two of my most persistent celebrity lovers, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan McGregor.

By Candy

It was my favorite movie in high school, because it made me feel somehow cooler by association. Now I can appreciate it with a little more nuance, but that doesn’t take away from its intense cool and the nostalgia it inspires within me.

Ewan McGregor plays Scottish heroin addict and general ne’er do well Renton in the film, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name. In the face of his addiction and the destructive relationships he forms with his similarly worthless friends, Renton decides to Choose Life after an almost fatal overdose and a series of horrible misfortunes that befall his friends.

The movie shows the ill effects of drug use without ever letting the film become overly maudlin. It is a hyper-realized world that Renton and his friends live in, and director Danny Boyle (who has gone on to make 28 Days Later and A Life Less Ordinary) negotiates this with a really innovative visual style that reflects the frenzy of addiction juxtaposed with the banality of everyday life.

“The streets are awash with drugs for unhappiness and pain,” the movie states; “we pile misery upon misery, heat it up on a spoon and dissolve it.” As entertaining as the film is to watch, it does not shy away from the harsh reality of the subject matter. Renton’s recovery is tainted when he ostensibly betrays his friends and continues in very sporadic drug use. The viewer isn’t confident that, despite everything that he’s gone through and seen, that he won’t use the money he steals to buy smack.

Ultimately, it seems like the movie wants to make a statement on responsibility, on being an adult, and as much as it artfully portrays drug usage, the drugs themselves could be seen as a device. Less optimistically, too, the film asks if people can really ever change, if it is within our nature to or within the nature of society to let us.

The film begins with Renton’s voice, like the nagging voice of society, urging you to choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family. It sets a tone with which we as people on the cusp of adulthood can’t help but empathize. And in lies the brilliance of the film. No matter how awful the characters seem at times, we want them to succeed because we want to succeed. In some way (obviously not to the level that Renton and co. do) we don’t want to necessarily choose life, we want to live in comfortable denial, whatever that means to us individually.

Trainspotting is a classic in every way, and still immensely relevant here, almost twelve years after it was released. And Ewan McGregor is still the sexiest heroin addict to ever hit the big screen.