New Film: It's Square to Be Hip

Slick Scots, glamorous heroin addiction, even a dead baby--but who cares, really? Apparently not the makers of the much-heralded "Trainspotting," who give us a rock'n'roll video of a movie whose wall-to-wall brogues and stretches of humor gloriously fall short of hopes for relentlessly hip status. It may look neat for a while--we've all been waiting for the Scottish "Kids," haven't we?--but the tiresome unreality of its "brutal reality" becomes maddening as the film's soundtrack pounds on.

Another Miramax import, the film tracks the misadventures of some twentysomethings in Scotland, nice little punks in their own special ways. The movie's humble narrator is Renton (Ewan McGregor), heroin addict by zealous choice, as he informs us in sympathetically bitter intonations.

The rest of the mischievous younguns are eventually rolled out one by one, name on the screen: the spastic freak-boy Spud (Ewen Bremmer); wanna-be Eurotrash, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller); and the human pitbull (and unintelligible) Begbie (Robert Carlyle). Wandering about, shooting up, picking women up, and so go their days and nights. They even throw in a drug deal to wrap things up. Unfortunately--almost tragically, fizzing with this much energy and hype--the film quickly tosses out the window any pretentions to portraying addiction or free-wheeling, troubled youth. Adapted from the popular Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, it hasn't so much lost something in the translation as added far too much film-y junk that leaves one too fuming to appreciate several fine, often grotesque performances.

Chief among such MTV-style additions is the incessant soundtrack which accompanies the characters' every move. This is a movie that has to indicate a scene's deep emotion by turning off the music, not turning it on. When Renton's going into withdrawal, you know from the muted, beta-wave techno beat that it'll be a typical, painless cold turkey exercise in fantasy: he'll be fine, whatever the psychedelic hallucinations. It's as if the filmmakers had some quota to fill for the movie's soundtrack album.

Yet the characters from the movie will not quickly leave you. Admittedly, there is something of the adolescent ensemble feel to it all--the loser, the normal kid, the hothead, etc.--but each one is played to the hilt.

McGregor's Renton fulfills all the requirements for his position as narrator, his spare intonations and face on close-shaven head giving good expression to all the horrors he must experience (not the least involving an opium suppository). Ewen Bremmer as Spud mugs more than Tim Roth at his most goofy, cowering and jerky.

One of the finest, most brutally consistent performance belongs to Robert Carlyle as the vicious, obnoxious Begbie, whose friends tolerate him out with grudging and fearful respect. You indeed feel real fear that you might be tapping the seat in front of you too much and Begbie's there, ready to reel off a stream of incoherent expletives and then sink a broken beer bottle into your neck. Tearing up a hotel room, living uninvited at Renton's, fighting dirty in brawls--he perfectly embodies the worst of every violent, drunken rage.

But director Danny Boyle just seems gleefully to forget any seriousness about one quarter of the way through the film. There are points where you hope for some witty Scottish version of the classic "Drugstore Cowboy," as Renton talks lyrically just like Matt Dillon did of his devotion to drugs.

Then this lyricism is abandoned in favor of some flashy camera-work and Iggy Pop.

The movie's own cheerful irreverence clashes with more hard-hitting moments, such as the downfall of the perfect Tommy (Kevin McKidd), leading to a general unevenness, set to a techno beat. The innocence shines through now and again--a kitten in a drug den, even Renton's own face alone--only to be quickly undermined. There's nothing wrong with mixing scatological or whoops-I've-slept-with-a-transvestite humor with addiction drama, but "Trainspotting" somehow manages to fall into the sit-com, serious moment dead zone: "Goddamn it say something, Renton! Somebody say something!"

Renton's withdrawal provides probably the lowest point in the film. Renton doesn't so much hallucinate as dream a carefully engineered catalog of guilt and fashionably crazy images: the ceiling-crawling dead baby (an unpardonable motor mockup) of an addict friend, check; a game show about HIV (a risk with syringes, we mustn't forget), check; and a voracious bed that swallows him up, check. To repeat--and oh, but the movie does--a techno beat pounds on throughout the scene, making Renton's screaming seem that of a hard rock star rather than an addict in withdrawal. At one point, creating perhaps unintentional irony, Begbie appears to Renton: he gives him an abusive, inspirational speech that seems to mock the scene as a whole.

Director Boyle keeps the requisite frenetic pace, and everything literally hits the ground running. The few tableaus where the camera and the bodies it captures are at rest provide the film's better moments: the silhouetted, smoking heads of Renton and Begbie after a violent confrontation, or the portrait of the youths standing on a train platform.

But too often contrived angles or other devices go too far: yes, subtitles in a night club are cute, but, no, freeze-framing things to let the narrator slap on unnecessary description is not.

In all, "Trainspotting" provides several very big laughs and perhaps hits just as much as it misses in depicting a certain breed of underclass, heroin-addicted youth in Scotland. Of course, the parents watch TV far too much yet keep on struggling, as those dang kids keep getting into trouble.

And so these kids' antics are fun to watch for a while, but, for all the touching moment and broad dramatic sweeps, the filmmaker's attitude seems to be that they remain antics, and an unconvincing, heavily ironic ending doesn't help. Although rolling R's and pronouncing a key word "shate" certainly jazz things up, boldness and brashness do not a drama make.