This is silliness, to be sure, but it's criticizable more because it's silliness passing itself off as high drama than because it's unintentional propaganda for heroin. There has been some fretting that Trainspotting "glamorizes" heroin use. Does it? The short answer is yes: When Renton and three pals exit a train (the only one I noticed in the film, except for those in the wallpaper in Renton's bedroom) and stand framed in a low angle on the station platform, they look like a rock band. This type of imagery becomes even more overt late in the film, when Renton's gang crosses the street in London on the way to its one attempt at a big drug transaction, and suddenly it's the Beatles crossing Abbey Road. Sure, some fool out there is going to find this enviable.
But to a hipster-wanna-be desperately stupid enough to buy the idea of heroin addiction as glam, there's probably not much help anyway. Show a junkie reduced to diving headfirst into a toilet to such a person, and he or she will likely regard it as the highest of endorsements.
Directed by Danny Boyle; with Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan, Susan Vidler, Kelly Macdonald, James Cosmo, Eileen Nicholas, Pauline Lynch and Irvine Welsh.
Unrated.
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