Directrospective: TRAINSPOTTING (1996)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Ewan McGregor in his breakout role as Edinburgh heroin addict Mark “Rent Boy” Renton, seen here screaming in cold-turkey agony.
Boyle’s international breakthrough TRAINSPOTTING is a young man’s film about youth and young manhood, directed by a 40-year-old. It’s hard to reconcile the director’s age with the energy and Gen X disaffection of the film, so much so that I checked my math a couple of times.
Set in Edinburgh and shot in Glasgow, the movie pulses with the dingy rave energy of Boyle’s native Madchester, often literally. The soundtrack is full of the sort of music that many of the character’s contemporaries would still call noise in 2020. While by no means an endorsement of the very ‘90s fuck-everything-and-drop-out ethos of its caustic opening “Choose Life” monologue, the film doesn’t make it sound completely off base, either. There’s an urgency and irreverence in its frankness about drugs and sex (I believe the film triples Boyle’s career dong count, now at three) and in its surreal practical sets. The brashness of its form and its content links it more to enfant terrible exclamations of the era like 29-year-old Tarantino’s RESERVOIR DOGS and 27-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson’s BOOGIE NIGHTS than to, say, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, though Boyle was only two years Anthony Minghella’s junior in 1996.
It’s confrontational in a way you’d expect from a younger director, too: in the famous Worst Toilet In Scotland scene Boyle underlines the degradation of addiction by tipping Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) head-first into a shit-caked public toilet, seemingly takes pleasure in lingering on the burst capillaries on a prop dead infant’s face, and reveals after the fact that Kelly Macdonald’s Diane was only 14 when we were all invited to watch her fairly graphic onscreen sex with 26-year-old Renton. The toilet scene marks the emergence of his coprophilic alter ego, Dookie Boyle - more on him in future posts.
As far as I can tell, Boyle mostly avoids the pearl-clutching moralizing that characterizes my cooler acquaintances’ complaints about drug films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, which is apparently obvious bullshit to anyone who has ever been cool enough to actually do cool drugs. (I just take their word for it. Seems pretty scary to me, but OK!) For all their toilet-diving and fatal infant neglect, TRAINSPOTTING’s junkie bunch aren’t irredeemable; they’re just self-obsessed. Certainly none of them does anything nearly as destructive or antisocial as violent alcoholic Begbie (Robert Carlyle), who wouldn’t go near the lowlife shit Renton and friends shoot into their arms. But as hot and charming as they are, they’re still morons and fuck-ups, and it’s not like middle-aged and married Danny Boyle hadn’t long since chosen life, chosen a job, chosen a family, very likely chosen a fucking big television when he made this film. By the time Renton runs into the classic Boylean problem of a bag full of money and only his conscience to keep him from running away with it, we know he isn’t going to invest it in a radical anarcho-syndicalist commune or burn it all in accordance with his noble, deeply held antimaterialist beliefs. As full of shit as Renton finds everyone around him, it’s not like he has any better ideas. For all its anti-establishment posturing, Boyle’s film has the politics of a well-versed narc.