TRAINSPOTTING IS A GRATUITOUS STORY OF A DRUG ADDICTION THROUGH THE EYES OF HIS PROTAGONIST PLAYED BY EWAN MCGREGOR

As it happened in the past and as it’s still happening nowadays, cinema tends to be inspired by literature, sometimes overusing it. In most of the cases it’s difficult that a screen adaptation could fully express the story of a novel, but in same rare circumstances this custom has proved wrong. In 1993 Scottish writer Irvine Welsh published his first novel Trainspotting. Few years later screenwriter John Hodge is inspired by the above mentioned book, and gives the script to English director Danny Boyle, who skilfully directed the movie with the same title and released it in 1996.

The film tells the story of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a heroin addict surrounded by his misfit friends as pusher Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), loser Spud (Ewen Bremner) and the always annoying and quarrelsome Begbie ( Robert Carlyle). Mark leads peacefully his life between an amateur football game and a drug dose. Some unpleasant events, plus an overdose, pushes him to reconsider his life style taking a difficult path towards the so despised average life.
After the 1994 British Cult film Shallow Grave trio made by Boyle-Hodge-McGregor keeps running with a movie that tells in an arbitrary way a topic, as drug addiction, stressing on some aspects of it with British dark humour. This film has been ranked 10th by the British Film in the list of Top 100 British films of twentieth century.

It’s one of the first movies that is openly about a drug story without finger-pointing or judging behaviours: characters are appreciated despite their awful life style, arousing compassion and at the same time some sort of empathy. This journey is told through a surreal photography, associated with a fantastic soundtrack that goes from hard rock to pop.

A captivating mixture, absolutely brilliant in the performances of each actor. Everything is masterminded by the director, who cleverly draws attention to the lives of those young losers, who, through a simplistic way of thinking, can relate with viewers despite a social gap, sensitizing their thoughts to a dark and unknown world.