A journey into the past
Director Danny Boyle brings new film to life by living in the moment
It’s difficult to understand what Danny Boyle is saying. Part of this is because we’re talking on cellphones in cars — his moving en route to an airport, mine illegally parked in residential Houston. The background crackle of digital networks provides a patina of dull noise.
Then there’s Boyle’s British brogue. It’s a beautiful sound, words bumping into one another, others elongating with a strange fluidity marked by staccato pops of emphatic gestures of enunciation. But to the casual ear, there are areas of misunderstanding during this swift dialogue about aging, nostalgia and our place in life. Without some reflective processing, it’s a conversation marked by moments of confusion.
In other words, it’s kind of
like watching Boyle’s beloved 1996 film “Trainspotting” without the aid of subtitles to translate the characters’ sticky Scottish accents. Which is fitting, I suppose, as the reason for this phone call is the director’s long-gestating sequel to “Trainspotting.” The film, which opens Friday, reunites the director from Manchester, England, with the story of
four Scottish lads addicted to heroin and the crimes of youth. They’re now grown men — at least in body — and mostly sober, but struggling with a new dilemma: the consequence of aging as it relates to the price of the past.
That framework is a topic anyone from the “Trainspotting” era can relate to. The film, and before it the novel by Irvine Welsh, implored a generation on the verge of being tapped into the internet to choose life, a cry to get off our sofas and engage with the world around us — results be damned. Yet, 20 years after hearing that, life has swept past us like one of those rushing trains that didn’t really play a large part in the film.
Whether by choice or not, life has taken its toll on us, and this new film feels like a forced perspective of nostalgia and reflection.
“The past is part of us all, especially with men, we cannot relive it without acknowledging the lessons of it or the reality of it,” Boyle says.
This, I can understand.
Tapping the zeitgeist
If you’re honest about it, 1996 was a strange time to be an adolescent.
The ghost of Kurt Cobain was still haunting us, his screams from the grave echoing an effective argument against the id-soaked stains of the ’80s. But the burn of the so-called “alternative” revolution he ignited had left a legion of kids and young adults branded by a contradictory sense of conformed independence.
There was more confusion.
That summer, a bomb disrupted the sense of peace at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. In September, someone tried to kill Bjork with a failed mail bomb — which, at the time, felt like trouncing on cultural royalty. That was also the month rapper Tupac Shakur was killed, which oddly was a jolt of life to hip-hop and Machiavellian conspiracy theories.
Oh, and there was the internet, bubbling up into all our lives with its welcoming chat rooms and pages upon pages of alien abduction reports.
The future was forming, faster than some people could handle. And in the search for relief, some of us fell into the calming balm of a frenetic film about Scottish heroin addicts in the ’80s.
“Trainspotting” felt like a mainline to the zeitgeist of the moment. The tale of a group of adolescent, male junkies trying to find purpose and pleasure in a crumbling world that didn’t reflect their interests and needs was a reflecting pool of frustration and desire.
Watching Renton (Ewan McGregor) crawl into “the worst toilet in Scotland” was more than a metaphor for life’s “crappy” rites of passage. It felt like communion. And though the story was sent through the prism of opiate addiction, the lads’ chase for their next fix felt like the continuing run toward purpose. Or enlightenment. Or anything else we were fixated on in a world still numbed by sitcoms with contrived laugh tracks. It felt like a portrait of freedom.
As the years have passed, “Trainspotting” has been discussed as a stylistic champion with great use of dialect, composition and music. As a sympathetic, yet realistic, view of drug abuse. And as a true view of Scotland’s working-class folk.
But when Boyle hears people reflect on the film and what it meant to them, the drugs and that infamous toilet aren’t top of mind. It’s the bond between the movie’s young men.
“I mean, they talked about them in the circumstances of the scenes, I’m not denying that, the toilet and all that. But they remember the characters’ names, and that’s not because we freeze-framed their names early in the film. Because you rarely remember a character’s name in a film. You remember the actor who played them,” Boyle says. “But these people would rattle off the characters’ names … the characters meant something to them.”
Indeed. I have friends who still talk about the “Trainspotting” lads as avatars or examples of their own friendships.
“I don’t know why, but I have my theories,” Boyle says. “They’re all extreme characters, of course. I mean, we’ve all had friends and there’s always someone who is in a fight. That’s the Begbie. … And Spud is the chaotic one. And I think they see their friends and remember them like that.”
He’s right. Which is why it’s sometimes difficult to watch the aged versions of them in “T2 Trainspotting.”
The new film, based off of Welsh’s novel “Porno,” is set 20 years after “Trainspotting.” It’s a continual reminder of the evaporation of youth.
Seeing the body of Spud (Ewen Bremner) contort and bend is a jab at our degrading joints. Watching Sick Boy ( Jonny Lee Miller) color his hair is a subtle nod to our overt insecurities about getting old. And the juxtaposition of Renton’s weathered, wrinkled face next to his elastic and youthful visage of 1996 plays like those surreal moments of realization found in the mirror.
This isn’t an accident.
“It’s the reason for doing (the film) … otherwise, why would you look at them 20 years later? Other than to see what does the past mean to them now? What’s left? What’s become of them? It’s a big part of the deal,” Boyle says. “So you have to look at yourself as well, as part of that.”
Aging with us
For those of us who came through the ’90s with “Trainspotting” as a benchmark experience, this sequel will be a journey into the self. But, imagine how that passage of time and perspective must be for the man who made these movies.
Remember, “Trainspotting” was Boyle’s first major success, vaulting him toward a résumé that now boasts an Oscarwinning film (“Slumdog Millionaire”), a genre flick that redefined the modern zombie movement (“28 Days Later”) and a movie built around the inevitability of James Franco cutting his arm off (“127 Hours”).
He’s become a topflight Hollywood director since those final edits to “Trainspotting.” As expected, his own journey into the past wasn’t an easy trek. Which is part of the reason why it took two decades to get a follow up made.
Some of the quick twitch looks at “T2 Trainspotting” will reference the one-time rift between Boyle and McGregor as the reason for the film’s delay. But the truth might be closer to Boyle not being ready for it.
“We tried to do (the movie) 10 years ago, and I know why we didn’t do it. It was a superficial reason, which is that we didn’t think (the script) was good enough, which it wasn’t,” Boyle says. “But the real reason is, I think, is that John Hodge, the screenwriter, and I, we weren’t ready to be honest enough to do it.
“When we sat down a couple years ago in Edinburgh, with the last chance, because the 20th anniversary was looming on the horizon, it became much more personal. Just because we wanted to, not because we thought we had to.”
The new film is filled with personal nuances built from Boyle’s life experiences through the past two decades.
“I missed my mother’s death. And at the beginning, there’s this good scene with Renton, and his mother had passed away and he didn’t make it back for the funeral and there’s her shadow on the wall,” Boyle says. “And, also, then, the film is littered with children who apparently have no father.”
It’s a universal motif, as is the reason for Boyle’s use of it — the guilt of spending more time with his work than his children.
“It’s saturated with these images of fathers and sons, particularly,” Boyle says.
Which is one reason why “T2 Trainspotting” might be as penetrating as its predecessor was to fans of the original film: It tells us the story of ourselves, in the moment.
It’s not quite an easy view, but it’s fulfilling.