Review of Trainspotting (1996) by Timo S — 06 Dec 2011

Trainspotting is a brilliant movie with a great story, great performances, and fantastic direction from Danny Boyle. When you watch it, you're actively engaged, and notice new things and understand the characters more and more every time.

I took me about three times to realize that Mark Renton is kind of an asshole, but that's why you relate to him. You may not necessarily want to face these bad qualities, but they exist, and Renton exemplifies them extremely well.

He's selfish and puts nothing before himself and heroin. The third time around I realized how fucked up it is that in an indirect way, Mark is responsible for Tommy's death. He steals Tommy's sex tape (just 'cause) causing Tommy's girlfriend to worry so much that she breaks up with him.

Tommy spirals into depression and decides he wants to try heroin. He drops the news on Renton while he's high out of his mind, enjoying a certain euphoria sprawled shirtless on a chair. This scene periodically transitions to another where Renton is listening to Sick Boy talk on and on about Sean Connery.

In that scene, Renton is just ignoring Sick Boy. In the scene with Tommy, he has no dialogue. There's a part of me that believes he initially didn't want to give Tommy heroin because he didn't want him to get hooked, but I believe that was just used to mask Renton's laziness.

Immediately when money's involved, Mark gives Tommy the goods, without even thinking about it. He's selfish. Tommy gets hooked on heroin and dies because of it. Mark grows up and matures and tries to forget his childish, heroin addicted past, but all of his old friends still desperately need him in one way or another.

They make him revert back to his old habits a bit, but he only complies because this is just another step in a slightly long process to get some money for himself and get them away from him. There's a scene after they've gotten the money where he suspects that they might've matured or changed, but that hope quickly goes down the drain when Begbie fucks everything up.

Mark yet again does things to benefit him and only him, he takes the money, not thinking about any of them, because they don't deserve it. Except for Spud. Spud's a good person at heart. And Mark's kind of a bad guy, but he realizes and admits it at the end.

Begbie reacts with a kind of infantile anger, but can you blame him? All this money was just stolen from him, and yeah, he's done some pretty nasty shit, but still. Mark talks excitedly about how he's going to redeem himself and live a sober, socially acceptable life going through the motions.

He seems like the type of person who desperately needs a routine, he obsessively organizes things. This is shown when he decides to quit heroin for the first time and goes through every little step to make sure he actually reaches his goal by laying out dozens of toiletries and food and buckets for every situation.

One can only hope that Mark does what he says he's going to, because we know he's capable of it. He just can't be around the rest of them. But even if by some unfortunate chain of events he does come crawling back to heroin, at least he's redeemed himself a pinch by giving some money to Spud, who's been for the most part the victim, and been through a lot of shit, and deserves it as some kind of consolation prize.