Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f----ing big television...Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows...Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f----ed-up brats that you've spawned to replace yourselves...But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?
By his own admission, Mark Renton, the enunciator of this caustic credo, is "a bad person." Heroin addict and layabout in the lower depths of Edinburgh, Renton steals from stores, locked cars, old-age pensioners' homes, his own mother's purse--all to support his "sincere and truthful junk habit." He blithely betrays his friends; his schemes help send two mates to jail and another into an early grave. When a baby in his shooting gallery suddenly dies, Renton's only impulse is to shoot up. He also smokes, talks dirty and blasts a dog's butt with BB-gun pellets.
But a wee bit of mother wit covers a multitude of crimes; a boyish charm can sell anything; vitality overwhelms prim moral compunctions. All three apply to Trainspotting, the Scottish comedy-horror show made for a Scots-thrifty $2.5 million. The wit is in the film's dialogue; it exhilarates even as it horrifies. The charm pours from Ewan McGregor's star-making turn as Renton. And the verve--that's director Danny Boyle's triumph.
From the first image--Renton jumps over the camera and hurtles down the street as store detectives chase after him, Iggy Pop's Lust for Life hammers the sound track, and Renton delivers his "Choose life" speech--the film is a nonstop visual and aural assault. Slo-mo, fast-mo, a hallucinogenic editing pace and the thick music of Scottish accents mean that you'll have to cram for Trainspotting. Attention must be paid, and will be rewarded with the scabrous savor of the movie's lightning intelligence. The subject is heroin, but the style is speed. This film is an upper--a jolt of pure movie energy.
In Britain Trainspotting has been an improbable multimedia smash. Irvine Welsh's novel, published in 1993, is the Brit-lit phenomenon of the decade. Told in what Welsh calls "a mixture of phonetics and street language" and sold in music stores to the postliterate generation, it spawned T shirts, posters and a stage adaptation that has been produced in Edinburgh, London and San Francisco. The film, with its attendant top-of-the-pops CD and published screenplay, quickly became Britain's second-biggest-ever homemade box-office winner (after Four Weddings and a Funeral, to which it acts as a bitter antidote, a strychnine chaser). The consensus out-of-competition hit at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Trainspotting invades U.S. theaters next week.