Directrospective: T2 TRAINSPOTTING (2017)

Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.

A grown-up, bitter Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) lets Renton (Ewan McGregor) know just how he felt about the end of TRAINSPOTTING.

Ideally, after delivering a fuck-everything proclamation as potent and all-encompassing as the “Choose Life” monologue that begins Danny Boyle’s 1996 film TRAINSPOTTING, you would quickly die. That would be the truest expression of the ethos, undeniable proof that you really meant everything you said about the emptiness of everything promised by the late-capitalist dream into which we all buy. You’d die by your own hand, but preferably not on purpose. You would live fast, have a great time, see through all the bullshit that makes everyone grind themselves to the bone trying to make more money only to feel as unsatisfied as when they started. Then you’d overdose or drunkenly stumble off a roof or fall asleep at the wheel or something.

But what if you didn’t die? What do you do once you hit middle age and maybe you’ve given the settle-down-have-kids thing a try, or you have a career that is sometimes fulfilling, or you’ve realized that your aging body now feels better without the hard drugs? What’s a 46-year-old recovered nihilist junkie supposed to do all day?

This is the question at the heart of T2 TRAINSPOTTING. The only sequel in Boyle’s filmography thus far, it is partially adapted from Irvine Welsh’s 2002 novel Porno, the sequel to his original Trainspotting. Porno is set nine years after Trainspotting, at which point there was still bad blood between Boyle and TRAINSPOTTING star Ewan McGregor over THE BEACH. While the two had since reconciled, enough time had passed since the first film’s release that Boyle’s regular screenwriter John Hodge ended up writing a mostly original story in the lives of the same characters, incorporating events from both Porno and the unfilmed parts of Trainspotting.

Following a heart attack on a treadmill in Amsterdam, where he has been living since he ripped off his friends at the end of TRAINSPOTTING, 46-year-old Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) heads back to Edinburgh to make amends. Twenty years sober from heroin and working a boring desk job, he’s doing a lot better than his old friends Spud (Ewen Bremner), who’s off the wagon after his wife left him for being kind of a fuck-up and took their son, and Sick Boy, who’s more of a coke guy now and makes money blackmailing clients of his Bulgarian sex worker girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) in addition to running a shitty pub he inherited. Begbie, the violent maniac they used to hang out with and from whom Renton also stole, is in prison with little hope of release.

The concrete events that unfold after Renton gets back to town aren’t particularly memorable; T2’s plot is the sort that melts from the brain as it goes. Renton tries to pay Sick Boy back what he took twenty years ago, unadjusted and without interest, and Sick Boy’s pretty pissed before he gets over it. Renton and Veronika have an affair. Spud tries to kill himself moments before Renton shows up and saves his life, then helps him get clean. Begbie escapes from prison and tries to bring his teenage son (Scot Greenan) into the small-time criminal business despite his obviously improper temperament. After taking its sweet time, the movie decides it’s going to be about Renton and Sick Boy and Spud and Veronika all renovating the top floor of Sick Boy’s pub into a brothel with the help of an EU development grant. Veronika encourages Spud’s writing, which turns into a memoir about the events of TRAINSPOTTING. Begbie finds out Renton’s back in town, wants revenge, and nearly kills Renton in the brothel construction site before he’s subdued by the others and dumped back at the prison. Veronika goes back to Bulgaria with the grant money, Spud finishes his book and gets his family back together, Renton and Sick Boy make up, and Renton moves in with his father (James Cosmo). Everybody’s little story gets nicely wrapped up.

In avoiding the DIE HARD 2 trap into which so many sequels fall - the absurd improbability of something else extraordinary happening in the life of a person who already had one movie happen to them - T2 is refreshing, if a little unexciting. Of course nothing as exciting as TRAINSPOTTING is going to happen all over again to the same people. There are blips of excitement here and there - an intense, excellently-staged bar fight between Renton and Sick Boy, and a visit from Dookie Boyle involving vomit and clear plastic - but these people are in their forties, drifting, and exhausted, and the film meets them at their level. We’re mostly watching the people from TRAINSPOTTING hang out in some of the places from that movie. Boyle makes liberal use of footage from the original film in a way that feels a little nostalgic, sure, but also wistful and sad. The youthful anger and exuberance that used to carry Renton and company through their shit-covered misadventures is gone, and in its place is a weary bitterness. Spud’s is the story with the happiest ending, and it’s one where he spends his time thinking about all the crazy stuff that happened in the first movie. It’s fascinating to me to think that this is the story Hodge came up with that got the whole gang back together for another movie. All the principles involved in the first film are doing just fine. None of them needed the money. They wanted to make this grey and defeated film.

Even Anthony Dod Mantle, who took up the Brian Tufano style that distinguished Boyle’s early work and made it his own over six films, seems unenthused about the chance to return to Boyle’s defining milieu. His colors are muted and mostly gone are the inventive practical drug effects of the first film. Boyle and Mantle fiddle around here and there with some non-diegetic projections on the walls of their scenes that I would have liked to see explored more as an idea, but there’s no topping the energy of that first film and nobody tries.

Edinburgh has changed since 1996 and it also hasn’t. Some OK places got shittier, some shitty places got gentrified. The heroin and grunge-era disaffection of the 1990s have given way to internet addiction and post-millennial ennui. Renton tries to update the “Choose Life” speech for 2017 and it comes out like a babbling Andy Rooney complaint, whether or not Hodge and Boyle intended it to. Very little is cool anymore, even anti-establishment sneering. They made a sequel to TRAINSPOTTING that is more than anything about how there isn’t much meat left on that bone. It’s not thrilling, but it’s admirable.