High reunion
Older, but not wiser, junkies from 1996 original Trainspotting return.
When the original Trainspotting hit back in 1996, it didn’t simply screen at theaters, it detonated. The saga of four heroin-addled youths in Edinburgh — trying to make a big score in London — was filled with so much energy it practically couldn’t keep itself contained on the screen. This gave viewers a bit of an inkling of the rush and kick of the drug itself, all encompassing, and frantic.
Like the infamous Velvet Underground song, its form actually gave nonusers the sensation of the drug’s epic run. It was also the early calling card of one Danny Boyle, born in Manchester but clearly sympathetic to the Scots, serving notice that a new talent was being unleashed with an updated, frenzied visual style that came at you from all over the place.
Twenty years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but in the case of this film, that’s the point: The original ended with Renton (Ewan McGregor), making off with the group’s hard-earned drug money and bailing out for parts unknown to restart his life. Now, two decades later, he returns to
Edinburgh, ostensibly to reconnect with his Pa, now a widower, but also, one surmises, to check in on some of the mates he left behind so long ago.
The first such friend, Spud (Ewen Bremner), is in the process of trying to commit suicide as his old friend stops by for an unexpected call (and true to the film’s unrelenting ethos, the drama of Renton saving his friend’s life is mitigated by Spud throwing up into the plastic bag he’d just secured to his head). Next, more damagingly, he meets up with Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), his former best mate, who beats the hell out of him with a pool cue. Simon has been busy running a blackmail scam, using his fetching female partner, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), as bait. Meanwhile, the most dangerous of the quartet, Begbie (Robert Carlyle), escapes prison and begins a new crime wave, attempting to lure his college-age son (Scot Greenan) to join him. Finding out about Renton’s return, he vows violent revenge, and begins the process of hunting him down.
As it happens, Renton isn’t in any position to judge any of his old pals: Despite appearances to the contrary, and a dedication to physical fitness, his life hiding out in Amsterdam has also disintegrated, and he quite literally has nowhere else to go. Shacking up with Simon, in an uneasy truce, the pair begin hatching a scheme to open a high-end brothel using grant money from the city to “revitalize” the industrial wasteland of Edinburgh’s docks.
As can be expected, the film is pulled in different directions. There is a strong allure of the quartet’s former proclivities, the wild gas it was to live their lives on those adrenaline-fueled benders. In one inspired scene, Simon and Renton infiltrate a resolutely Protestant bar in order to steal credit cards and end up having to take the stage and sing a spontaneous anti-Catholic ode; in another, Renton, having climbed on top of a speeding car in a parking garage to escape Begbie, grins from ear-to-ear with the call-back to his utterly self-destructive youth. The film presents us with such moments of enjoyable chaos, while at the same time working a far more melancholy angle of lost youth, opportunity, and the resentment of middle age creeping into the characters’ lives (“Nostalgia,” Simon hisses, “you’re a tourist to your own youth”).
Meanwhile, in one of the film’s more emotionally striking scenes, Renton and Simon absolutely eviscerate each other for their worst past transgressions as only childhood friends can, the exchange ending in truce of acknowledgement that both are equally morally reprehensible. It’s a moment that suggests some of their ludicrous, youthful indiscretions have actually had catastrophically bad outcomes — the middle-aged men confronting their anarchic teenage years with a different perspective. In this way, we as an audience who laughed so hard at their antics 20 years ago, are also dully chastised: At some point adolescent antipathy ceases to be comedy and just turns tragic.
The old film is visually referenced time and again, often with Boyle’s penchant for superimpositions, like a film reel playing against the wall of the background, but it’s also given a different sort of homage, using many of the same industrious tricks (point-ofview cameras, text overlays, vertigo-inducing camera angles) that made the first one so visually stylish.
It can be an odd mashing up of impulses — after all, fans of the original film want nothing more than to see their anti-heroes throw themselves back into their freewheeling, chaotic ways; but at the same time, we watch Spud attempt to gain some semblance of self-worth and desperately want him to stay clean. That is, after all, much of what our lives comprised in later years: A desire to be every bit as lunatic and unpredictable as we were at our physical peak, coupled with the knowledge that we are responsible to other people now, and our bodies can no longer take such punishment without true repercussions.
Often, with long-term sequels such as this, the question is raised why there was a need to return to that particular world. In most cases — we can take Zoolander 2 as a prime example — it’s little more than a blatant pitch to recapture the stars’ gleam, and the original’s box office bonanza. Sometimes, though, the passage of time can be a blessing for a film, as long as it’s acknowledged. The quartet of gifted actors can’t possibly match their youthful charisma (Carlyle, in particular has aged into a peculiarly boxy figure), but they can find deeper resonance in the characters’ emotional lives, a sense of lessons learned and proper amends proffered.
The film’s final image has Renton back in his old, train-wallpapered room, putting on the Stooges’ song that became the first film’s calling card. Watching him gyrate to the music is hardly a triumphant celebration of his spirit, though: As the elder Renton tries to re-engage with his youth we mostly feel embarrassed for him. For those of us old enough to remember how he was — how we all were — some 20 years ago, the scene becomes a study in wince-inducing irony. Lust for life, indeed.