SHOW+TELL Cumberbatch reframes Trainspotting for the aristocracy – but doesn’t end on a high

THE BIG PULL of the screen adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels is Benedict Cumberbatch in the contentious title role. Melrose is an addict. Heroin mostly but, in the absence of a bag of brown and a rusty needle, Quaaludes, coke, speed bombs or martinis, slugged malevolently in fancy restaurants.

Melrose acts like a spoilt rotter, cut from the most despicable echelons of the English upper classes. He switches between luxe art deco New York hotel suites and London dwellings wallpapered by William Morris, routinely treating women with contempt. With gung-ho Freudianism, his cruelty and nihilism is attributed, via flashback, to abuse by his freshly-dead father. There’s a lot to play with here.

And wow, does Cumberbatch play it. His Melrose is set at a pitch of permanent delirium. His highs veer from Shakespearian scenery-chewing to something oddly reminiscent of Hugh Grant’s vaudevillian excess in Paddington 2. It’s a crash, bang, wallop performance strong on the basic causality of serious substance abuse, less so its credible effects.

Cumberbatch’s most noteworthy scenes are played against himself. Some good cameos – from the brilliant Allison Williams and Jennifer Jason Leigh – are squandered. In a wall-sliding bar encounter with the aunt he once tried to tell of his childhood trauma, he is actually quite funny, giving Melrose more than a touch of Ab Fab’s Patsy Stone.

Of the two screen classics about heroin addiction – ’70s German gem Christiane F and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – Patrick Melrose has learned nothing from the former and stolen everything from the latter. The saturated colours, internal voiceover narrative, warp-speed sound manipulation, plunging long shots into watery oblivion are all an inch away from pastiche.

Because Boyle’s signature configuration of the jobless, pop-cultural heroin experience is transposed into screaming aristocratic rage here, Melrose ends up as Cambridge Footlights doing Trainspotting’s Greatest Hits on Mummy and Daddy’s Amex card. And honestly? You’ll learn more about male sexual abuse from the sensitive handling of David Platt’s current rape storyline in Coronation Street than you will in the opening hour of this exhausting star vehicle. Approach with caution.

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