On top of the characters I think Boyle has some impressive shots in this feature, that is when he isn’t directly biting off Stanley Kubrick, which he admits to during the early dance club scene where the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange is so obviously duplicated.
I loved the image of the baby that I led off this article with, the picture of the kitten above I thought was extremely impressive, especially considering the circumstances of the scene, and one image that really caught my eye was the one just below.
This image comes as the boys (left to right: Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie) are on their way to a drug deal. I am not sure if people will get the similarity in this screen capture to one of the most famous musical images ever, but if you mouse over the image above you will see what I am hinting at.
Of course, I am not the only one that caught this, and a trip over to IMDB’s trivia page tells me there are three other Beatle references in the film. However, in reference to this one I wish Boyle would have made better use of it. There has always been speculation around the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” photo, most notably the “Paul is Dead” scenario because he has a cigarette in the wrong hand, is barefoot and out of step with the three other fellas.
A great play here would have been to have whomever the third fella (in this case Spud) in line die at the end of the flick. Unfortunately Spud lives and continues his drug using ways and the mystique of “Paul is dead” continues to be a stupid superstition. Oh well.
Finally, one last notable item I took away from this flick pertains to Miss Kelly Macdonald, pictured above in all her glory. Trainspotting was Macdonald’s feature film debut and she has gone on to star in such films as Gosford Park, Finding Neverland (she was Peter Pan) and most recently she had a fantastic performance in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. She is also starring in the feature film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke as Paige Marshall, a perfect role for her. She is a great talent, and here she plays an underage school girl, which I am sure you can understand just helps with this messed up little storyline. Don’t worry though, she was 20-years-old in Trainspotting.
Trainspotting is a good film, and ironically after my last sentence I think it plays very much like a Coen brothers film in the way that it doesn’t do what you expect it to. This is a movie that I will need to watch again, and it is a movie that will get better the more times you watch it. Like No Country for Old Men there is a piece of the story I don’t like, and it has to do with the film’s resolution. However, I don’t believe I am expected to like it.
Boyle has painted a picture of reality with this film. This is the life of a junkie and if you don’t like it, good, you aren’t supposed to strive to be addicted to heroin. I can guarantee if I were to watch this film again in a month or so I would enjoy it even more knowing what I know now. This doesn’t mean I am going to ruin the ending for you, it does mean you should give it a chance if you didn’t like it the first go ’round.
As a parting gift I give you “The Toilet Scene”:
