InT2,Trainspotting grows up
IT WAS was with some trepidation that I entered the theatre within which T2 Trainspotting was playing. It is a sequel released 21 years after the fact, a red flag in and of itself. But more than that, it’s a sequel to a film the whole premise and power of which is driven by youthful bravado, by reckless disregard for rules and regulations, by the perils and pointlessness of a life lived with little to love and less to lose.
I needn’t have worried. This isn’t some cash grab from a studio cannibalising its intellectual property, nor is it a desperate reunion of out-of-work actors and director. T2 Train- Trainspotting. spotting is, in its own way, a wryly mature look at immaturity, an examination of a world that has moved on and how those who are ill-equipped to deal with the shifting currents get left behind. What could have been little more than a nostalgia trip for ageing Xers looking to recapture their youth is, instead, a rather poignant examination of what it means to be a man in a world with little use for “real men”.
T2 Trainspotting picks up two decades after the first left off. Mark (Ewan McGregor) has spent his time hiding out in Amsterdam after robbing his pals following a big drug sale at the end of the first film; his stint as a reputably employed individual is coming to an end thanks to layoffs, and his long-term relationship is falling apart.
Simon ( Jonny Lee Miller) has remained in Scotland, a smalltime extortionist with dreams of becoming a small-time pimp. Spud (Ewen Bremner) remains locked in a deathstruggle with smack, trying to get clean for the sake of his kid but unable to make the leap into sobriety. And Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is still Begbie: Boorish, brash and boisterously violent, he’s on the lam after escaping from prison.
The lack of forward momentum from the foursome – or the false appearance of the same – is a key theme. When I told director Danny Boyle, a fasttalking and spritely Brit, that I T2 had feared the movie would be little more than a nostalgia trip and was pleasantly surprised to be wrong, he simultaneously grimaced and grinned.
“After we’d been editing for a few weeks, and we watched the film back, I thought ‘No, it’s not about that,’” Boyle said. “I mean, it’s still about that. But it’s actually about masculinity. And every scene, I could take you through it: I was watching a screening where it’s just me and the editor, and I was shocked at every scene I saw was about masculine behaviour.”
These men of Scotland’s white working class are, in many ways, stuck in a world that has little use for them. “I’m f—,” Mark says midway through the film, recounting his entry into middle age coinciding with vanishing job prospects as international mergers at his place of business conjure up the threat of layoffs. Begbie, trying to adapt to the modern world and feeling something akin to horror when he learns his son is headed off to college to study hotel management rather than becoming a proper villain like his old man, vocalises a frustration that many of those left behind by globalisation have felt. “World’s all right for smart c—,” Begbie says. “But what about us? What about men?”
Of course, to Begbie “men” are those whose worth depends on brawn and bravado, the ability to punch their way out of (and into) any situation. He’s a blue-collar criminal, one who doesn’t understand the interconnected world where computers and smartphones and T2Trainspotting college degrees reign supreme.
“That’s all he’s done in his life; he’s just smashed people to get what he wants,” Boyle says. “Frightened them, intimidated them. Because it’s about power and that muscular thing you feel in your 20s, where you go, when he’d fight anyone then, Begbie. And what’s left for him now? It’s very sad, actually. It comes across very savagely, but it’s really desperately sad.”
That sadness permeates the foursome and the film itself, which is less frenetically edited than its forebear, less reliant on a pulsing soundtrack and a series of loosely strung together misadventures to move the plot forward. It feels a bit more languorous because it is: Longer than its predecessor and reduced in pace, T2 Trainspotting is an arresting portrait of arrested development.