Home Regulars Features Star Bios Chat Archive

News & Reviews Archive

Search Mr. Showbiz

Daily Dose Archive


Letters to the Editor
Ask Mr. Showbiz
The Water Cooler
Vocabulary Builder

News Archive


Scoop
Week In Review

Reviews Archive


Movies
Music
TV
Books
Theatre




Movie Reviews Archive
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U-Z
Choosing Heroin

(1.8MB AVI) | (1.8MB MOV)

Trainspotting, starring Ewan McGregor; directed by Danny Boyle

"Choose Life," says the angry young thug with the buzz cut and the Scottish burr. "Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fuckin' big television." Meet Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), the fast-talking, quick-tempered anti-hero of Trainspotting. "I chose not to choose life," he declares. "I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"

Reader Reviews
Want to share your opinions about this major motion picture? This is your chance to talk back to the Mr. Showbiz film critics.

Given its controversial subject matter (heroin addiction, taken in stride) and its savage humor, it isn't surprising that Trainspotting was the out-of-competition smash of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. As far as director Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave) and screenwriter John Hodge (working from the novel by Irvine Welsh) are concerned, nothing is sacred: drugs, excrement, mayhem, parental guidance, and the secret sex lives of Catholic schoolgirls are all fair game.

At the same time, the film never cheats the horror and anguish of real-life drug addiction. We're made party to the ghastly accidental death of an addict's neglected infant, and several prolonged sequences (paced like anti-matter musical numbers) in which the hero hallucinates with nightmare intensity while trying (sometimes cold turkey) to throw off his dependency. (One bit involving a spectacularly filthy toilet will no doubt be the conversation piece of the film's release.) Kicking heroin is something Mark attempts from the first scene. He succeeds at first, but then, after a series of calamities and a simple liking for the heroin lifestyle get the best of him, he's forced to slay the same dragon several times over, until we're not sure he's going to make it.

87

Almost every one of his pals--Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner), Tommy (Kevin McKidd), Begbie (Robert Carlyle)--succumbs to the drug in one way or another; those who don't wind up dead become mentally enslaved. Yet the film often has a freewheeling gaiety; at times, it plays like a cross between Drugstore Cowboy and A Hard Day's Night. Mark and the movie are on the side of freedom, which was the false charm of heroin in the first place; his quest to be his own man is his only hope, and the movie's one stealthy claim to a moral core.

For the rest of it, director Boyle and screenwriter Hodge refuse to pass judgment on Mark or his friends, giving the movie an amoral surface. You might well ask if, by an accident of energetic artistry, such sexy self-destruction doesn't sell a new mystique of heroin use to its more impressionable young viewers. It's a hard artistic question: how do you truthfully map the lower depths without making them look attractive? The allure seems built into human nature. The makers of Trainspotting, with their ensemble of bright new actors and newborn star McGregor (who will shortly be seen in a very different light, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma) boldly side with reckless honesty, redeemed by the hero's upbeat refusal to cave into self-pity. It's a disturbing film in the best sense. -- F.X. Feeney

(Rated R for adult subject matter and language.)

Cast and Credit List


Back to Movie Reviews Archive Index Current Movie Reviews


Send your comments to Mr. Showbiz

Copyright 1996 Starwave Corporation. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form.