Trainspotting ... and Filth

While much of British film making is lost in editing an endless stream of new versions of the Battle of Britain, "Trainspotting" is a major piece of work.  The movie is a highly-disturbing view of young heroin addicts in Scotland.  Ewan McGregor plays the lead as Mac in an absolutely convincing role.  Mac and his mates live depraved lives around heroin but they aren't portrayed as mindless buffoons as that would have reduced the movie to being yet another anti-drug cartoon.  Instead, Mac's reasons for using heroin follow a deliberate if hugely self-destructive rationale, one of which being there is a purity in addiction in contrast to the superficial consumerism of the middle class and the wholesale corruption in government.

"Trainspotting" gets a bit off-track in two places.  The first is a bit of absurdity when Spud soils the bed in the home of his girlfriend's parents but this is a minor aside to the overall story.  The latter is the ending when Mac, in effect, dances into the sunset after stealing from his mates the profits from a heroin deal.  Ostensibly he will remain free of heroin and join the rest of the world in the mediocrity of middle class living.  Whether this ending is credible is for you to determine but I didn't find it entirely satisfying.

I see the previous aspects as shortcomings but the movie, in my view, is important nevertheless.  The patterns of drug use in Scotland and likely England as a whole are very different from America and the view presented by the movie is not an unrealistic cinematic extreme.  The editorial on this is regarding the failure of the war on drugs in America and the movie demonstrates a similar failure in Scotland, albeit a very different one.  For this reason, "Trainspotting" provides more of a public service than you may realise.

The reason this is of current interest is the makers of "Trainspotting" have now released their latest work, "Filth."  This time they've gone to the antipodean extreme and made a comedy but, just like "Trainspotting," the reviews are very good.  Whether this presages Scottywood remains to be seen and it will be interesting to see if "Filth" really does reach the level of "Trainspotting."


An aside you may find interesting is that Ewan McGregor's brother is a fighter pilot in the RAF and together they were recently in a film about, oh yeah, the Battle of Britain.  The question isn't whether the Battle of Britain was the country's finest hour as I have supreme respect for what they did.  Nevertheless, there probably isn't a need for so many versions of the story, all of which are pretty much the same.