T2 Trainspotting

The original Trainspotting was part of the late 90s wave of new (mostly American) film makers redefining what popular cinema could be. Fincher, Tarantino, (Paul Thomas) Anderson,  (Wes) Anderson, Wachowskis, Jonze, Russell, and Boyle were bursting on the scene with their oh-too-cool first features which were accessible enough to move beyond the hipster crowd into the mall cinemas. They've all become establishment now, winning awards and settling into more mainstream media, Boyle with his Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire and more traditionally respectable films like 127 Hours, Steve Jobs, and the upcoming Battle of the Sexes. But Trainspotting, like his slick debut Shallow Grave, holds a special place in the hipster filmography for the way it romanticizes heroine culture while simultaneously  terrifying us of it.

It's brilliance truly came in Boyles smart means of capturing the surrealism of altered reality, adding charm and humour, and patting its audience enough on the back for not being the subject. It's almost druggie tourism, where we love how cool it all is but enjoy being just voyeurs. We "choose life" and the humdrum lives we lead as critiqued by the film's subjects, is rewarded by the smugness we get as the audience.

What's fascinating with seeing Boyle revisit this 20 years later, featuring actors who have become  movie stars (and TV stars), is how he can't do this again. T2 (awkwardly already the name of a sequel to a pretty big movie) isn't focused on the travails of being addicted to drugs and drowning in crime. It's focused on the mundane questions of divorce, children, health concerns, employment, loss/regret and all those things we thought these guys were immune to. There was the excitement at the end of Trainspotting which came from "Rentboy" pulling off his escape. And the melancholy truth explored in T2 is that he escaped to the real world. For me T2 had more pathos than its predecessor.

Renton and Boyle have the same journey here, a return to something they just can't capture again. Boyle seems self-aware of that, and that's where T2 becomes the most enjoyable, most insightful.  T2 visually is reminiscent of the original film but it takes this story and its characters to a logical but somewhat tragic place. It is easy to just predict their deaths based on their lifestyles in the first film, but there is something much truer, much more disappointing, in seeing them get to here.  

Sequels and remakes need a reason to exist and it has to be more than just wanting to see more of the same. T2 and Boyle eschew the more of the same to find a fascinating exploration of aging past the reject the future lifestyle of the young Renton and friends. And that makes revisiting them more interesting than I expected it would. Being the same age of the characters, even if separated by culture, nationality, and socioeconomic class, I related to them finding themselves at this place in life. Boyle's achievement here is his honesty with his story.

For example, Renton has his iconic "choose life" speech only this time he says it, not as mantra, but as description of what he might say and why. He, and we, are reflecting on where we were and where we ended up, and where we are going. While it certainly feels less revolutionary, it feels more mature and perhaps even more substantial. T2 ends up being a worth follow up even if it may not have the impact of the film it is following.

T2 Trainspotting
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly MacDonald
Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: John Hodge