Trainspotting

A controversial, blackly comic view of the life of heroin addict Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) and the group of junkies, deadbeats, thieves, liars, and psychopaths who he calls friends. Renton is a clever, witty anit-hero, who consciously chooses the life of a junkie over the utter boredom of everything else. While getting the squalor and degradation of the junkie lifestyle down to the last grotesque detail, Trainspotting also captures the way drugs give structure and meaning to otherwise aimless lives, and describes, in detail, the breathtaking rapture of a fix. Director Danny Boyle shows himself to be a unique talent, in this stunning and at times revolting follow-up to his earlier success Shallow Grave. Much of the success of the film is due to the performance of Ewan McGregor, who is both charming and repellant in the role of Mark. McGregor deftly plays the unrepentant Mark as he tells his story, and shows the same comic flair that he did in Shallow Grave. Danny Boyle challenges his audience as Mark explains his chosen lifestyle, but does not apologize for it, and it is this nonjudgmental stance that gives the film its power. The audience is asked neither to approve of Mark nor to emulate him. Boyle simply tells Mark's story, brutal, funny and loathsome as it can be, leaving the moralizing to be done by others.