“Why stop working if you enjoy what you do,” – Shotgun Mouthwash, High Contrast.
Why indeed? There is no reason to stop if there is enjoyment and passion in hard work. T2 Trainspotting is at home with that thought. Only one thing can stand between writing away in a happy life and that is a complete and utter failure or breakdown of the internal organs, excluding kidneys, including the brain. A bit like the reason Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) finds himself heading back to Leith after all those years. Mid-life crisis, redundancy, health trouble, robbing from the abandoned scum that deserves it, taking a chance on a trip back to a nostalgic root that was left behind for reasons that are fresh in the mind after watching, reading and thinking about what Irvine Welsh was trying, desperately, to make clear with Trainspotting. The Danny Boyle-directed sequel is a chilling continuation of all those woeful troubles.
Inherent to the grim nature of T2 Trainspotting is a reconsidering of where these characters find themselves. They are, to some degree, in the same place they always were. Renton still masks himself in living a new life but deep under that is the trouble with keeping alive and interested. Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) scams and strikes his way through some horrible entrapments. Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is rightfully behind bars, looking into the human anatomy to escape and head back into a scheme. Spud (Ewen Bremner) is as gormless and charming as ever. It is all there and articulated with extreme precision. Boyle does well to move these characters on but keeps their fundamentals in a similar status to that of the first feature.
Doing so means T2 Trainspotting can interrupt certain narrative flows founded by the first, to look back on those with a backdrop of a changing Scotland. There is beauty in that return. Real, stark beauty. Renton’s mum passed, the silhouette left behind. Tommy and the tribute to his life, the reminiscent feel of it. T2 Trainspotting is a feature all about forgiveness, not just of those that have done wrong but of the self also. That shock to the system of being back in the childhood bedroom, engaging with a track that defined a rough period that was in need of being forgotten. That is the crucial layer of T2 Trainspotting, McGregor captures that with such acclaimed precision. There is a brutal element to the sequel that was always at the forefront of the first. In that period, it felt like rebellious foolishness against a system keeping them down, in T2 Trainspotting, it feels like a reflex to those similar, tough experiences.
With T2 Trainspotting comes a raw beauty, though. Those little flourishes. The charms that Boyle brings to the experience that waited two decades to conjure. “The great wave of gentrification is yet to engulf us,” as Sick Boy notes. Not yet. Maybe it will not. It does not for T2 Trainspotting – and that is the great quality of it. It feels untouched. Choose life. Live it. T2 Trainspotting is what happens. Right at the core of T2 Trainspotting, right in that emotive spot that so few films can tap into, is a sincere desire to set things right. If not right, then in the course and motion of being right. Delicate T2 Trainspotting may be, but it is a gamble that pays off, showing just how fundamental the futility of life is. Choose it anyway. Find an addiction. Feel again.
