A SEQUEL THAT ARRIVES ALIVE
Trainspotting crew is back together for a nostalgic, and judgmental, turn
Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin? And who needs heroin when you’ve got nostalgia? It’s nourishing and also bad for you. It’s sweetly bitter. It soothes while it burns. It’s the drug of choice for many a man in his 40s, not least the layabouts at the core of Danny Boyle’s sequel to Trainspotting, an anthem of rudderless youth so catchy that legions of ’90s college kids pinned its lyrics to their dorm walls.
T2 Trainspotting reunites Renton (Ewan McGregor), Begbie (Robert Carlyle), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Simon (Jonny Lee Miller) some 20 years after Renton made off with 16,000 pounds, the proceeds of a drug deal gone unexpectedly right. The actors have been busy in the meantime (as Sherlock Holmes, Obi-Wan Kenobi, directors, etc.), but their characters have moved forward but a little, if at all.
Begbie, for instance, is planning an escape from jail. Spud is trying his best, but he missed a bunch of job-hunting appointments by not remembering to set his watch back an hour for summer time. Simon is running a pub and making ends meet by making ends meet — he has a sideline in prostitution and another in blackmail. Renton has been swimming with the middle class in Amsterdam, and is now back in Edinburgh hoping to repay the money he stole from his friends.
The first Trainspotting back in 1996 was adapted loosely from the novel by Irvine Welsh. The sequel, with John Hodge returning as screenwriter, imagines that time has surged ahead while the characters weren’t looking. In 2017, Edinburgh airport is ringed with eastern European women in kilts, telling visitors: “Welcome to Scotland.”
The globalization trend continues with Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), Simon’s Bulgarian girlfriend/partner-in-crime, who looks on with a mix of incomprehension and amusement when he and Renton sink into a playby-play reminiscence of a footy match even they are almost too young to remember.
Director Danny Boyle has never made a sequel in his life, preferring to hopscotch from one genre to another — horror (28 Days Later ...) followed by fantasy (Millions), then sci-fi (Sunshine) and drama (Slumdog Millionaire), then adventure (127 Hours) and crime drama (Trance) and biopic (Steve Jobs). Being constantly in motion has served him well, and T2 manages somehow to both wallow in nostalgia and stand back in judgment of it.
“You’re a tourist in your own youth!” Simon barks at Renton during one of the film’s more maudlin asides, allowing it to undercut its own pathos. And Renton updates his famous “choose life” rant for a new century, while the psychopathic Begbie tries to instil in his teenage son a reverence for a bit of the ol’ breaking and entering and taking and thumping, even though all the lad wants is a degree in hotel management.
Aided by Anthony Dod Mantle’s excellent lighting and cinematography, the movie rollicks and caroms forward and a little sideways. We see Spud hit by a wave of recognition on the street corner where he and Renton were once chased by the police. And amazingly, we see McGregor break into the same lopsided grin after rolling off the hood of a moving car.
If there is a pothole in this memory lane, it’s the inclusion of Kelly Macdonald’s character, Diane, from the first film. It’s nice to see her again, but her appearance and line of work dovetails so perfectly with the rest of the plot that it feels manufactured. For just a moment, we are aware of the puppet master. But maybe it’s just another instance of the “who needs reason?” line of thinking.
If you choose to see T2, you have to choose to take it on its own terms. So choose.