It had been about ten years since I last saw Trainspotting, the hyperactive Scottish heroin movie that plays like it were on speed. It's lost none of its energy, pulsating through its 90-minute runtime with the gusto of a rhythmic rock album, but it already feels dated, very much a piece of 90s culture. It's the natural inheritance of A Clockwork Orange, both for its baroque, glorified, in-your-face stylistics, and for the narrative surrounding a group of angry young guys filled with rebellious energy and no outlet for it except, in this instance, drug addiction. Also like Kubrick's film, it presents an ambivalent picture of their lifestyle, at once glamorizing it through the movie's intense energy, and at the same time making no bones about its horrifically destructive, nightmarish consequences.
The appeal and humor of it all wanes fairly fast, and we're left yearning to escape and move on, much like Ewan MacGregor's protagonist. Life may be as commercialized and standardized as it's sarcastically rendered here, but that certainly feels like the better option after witnessing the ugliness of the alternative.
Ultimately, this is a movie about growing up. In that sense, it's even closer to Burgess' A Clockwork Orange more than Kubrick's, or going back even further, Fellini's I Vitelloni. One can also see the impact this movie had on other late 90s works, from the surreal, drug-induced subjectivity of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the sardonic, fast-paced voice-over of Fight Club. Given the choice, I probably prefer those other movies to this one, though none of them appeal to me as much as they did ten years ago. I guess that I, too, have moved on.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1782964 times)
