T2
TRAINSPOTTING
Sometime in the 1950s the British discovered
their working class as more than, well, workers, happily content, in Matthew
Arnold’s phrase, with chapel and beer. The postwar expansion of higher
education, the introduction of social services, the general sense of new
beginnings that accompanied the end of a long period of Tory control, and a
whole generation that had suffered disproportionately through the war combined
with a long history of oppression and denial to create the group of writers known
as The Angry Young Men. The title
derives from Look Back in Anger, a play
by John Osborne, one of their number, which also included such writers as
Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse, and Alan
Sillito.
Aside from awakening the culture to some new insights, their writings
inspired a number of lively, relevant films during one of the rare bright
periods in the generally dismal history of British cinema. Those films featured a new generation of
actors, many of whom differed from their predecessors in class background, appearance,
and accent (always a primary point in England).
Actors like Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, David Warner, Richard Harris, Michael
Caine, and, yes, Sean Connery, with strong regional accents and simply, a
different look challenged the classically trained theater veterans who’d
dominated the Shakespeare, Shaw, Coward material of the English stage.
One of the best and most entertaining cinematic demonstrations of that transformation
occurs in Sleuth (1972), in which
Laurence Olivier plays a wealthy, aristocratic mystery novelist and Michael
Caine the hairdresser lover of the writer’s wife. The gap between the working class Milo Tyndle
and the snobbish, superior Andrew Wyke opens immediately when with a sneer, Wyke
asks Tyndle if he lives above, below, or
behind his shop; on the other hand, the Italian-English Tyndle suggests that
Wyke’s wife appreciates the hairdresser’s greater virility, the usual source of
insecurity for the upper classes. They spar,
exchange insults, and embark on a preposterous and complicated game created by
the writer that ends in a somewhat ambiguous and inconclusive surprise. The contest of the movie reflects not only
the class distinctions between the two characters, but also the change in
generations, as a new kind of actor appears opposite one of the most honored
performers of his time, a kind of summation of the revolution that occurred in British
cinema in the last two decades.
In addition to the films based on or inspired by the works of the Angry
Young Men, several of those sharp and entertaining Ealing Studio comedies of
the 1950s dealt with some of the same issues.
Those whimsical, witty movies that introduced a troupe of fine, mostly
comic actors to the public often revolved around social realities and a few,
like I’m All Right, Jack and The Man in the White Suit, for example,
suggested the changes in political and economic thinking in the new, postwar
Great Britain. Almost all of them
satirized elements of the class system in one way or another, and many combined
that with something of the anarchic humor of many American movies.
Unfortunately, that revolution, like so many revolutions, ultimately
fostered its own particular meaningless and distressing responses to the
culture and perhaps to itself. The
importation and reinterpretation of rock music from the United States fed first
a new exuberance and another example of creativity welling up from the lower
classes rather than seeping down from the cultured upper classes. That music metastasized into other forms,
including punk rock, which employed a strong sense of social upheaval and, once
again, anarchy. Names like Sid Vicious
and Johnny Rotten efficiently sum up the attitudes, along with band names like
The Sex Pistols and The Sniveling Shits (I am not making this up). Ultimately, I think, the decadence that in
the past tended to trickle down, shall we say, from the effete elites
eventually to some degree bubbled up from the depths, a result of the same
energy that initially galvanized the new culture.
This long, possibly accurate, and I hope, not too boring preliminary
leads to the latest British film import, T2
Trainspotting, a sequel to the original of twenty years ago. The director, Danny Boyle, ingeniously
brought back the same principals from that movie to play the same characters,
now of course twenty years older themselves.
Though times have changed and the actors and their characters have aged,
everything else seems depressingly familiar.
Renton (Ewan McGregor), the nearest thing to a protagonist, returns to
his old home town in Scotland and his crew of druggies and criminals to find
everything different but somehow the same.
Although one member of the gang dies on a treadmill to open the film,
the rest of the crew remains. The psychopath
Begbie (Robert Carlyle) begins the action in prison; the junkie Spud (Ewen
Bremner) fights an intermittent battle against his addiction; and Simon (Jonny
Lee Miller) runs a blackmail racket involving his girlfriend Veronika (Anjela
Nedyalkova) and a strap-on dildo (don’t ask).
Though sometimes comic, the action mostly depends on the same old
violence and thievery. Begbie escapes
from prison and seeks to kill his former pals, who have betrayed him; the
pathetic Spud ultimately kicks his habit; after a wild fight, Renton and Simon
collaborate on a scheme to swindle a grant to make a pub into a tourist spot. Maintaining some continuity with the
original, the director frequently employs shots of trains as transitions
between scenes and sequences, and rather overdoing it, shows Renton’s childhood
bedroom decorated with railroad train wallpaper.
The movie provides fewer shocks and fewer disgusting images than its
predecessor, and even hints at a modicum of sentiment. Perhaps the best scene involves Renton and
Simon improvising to save their lives on a stage in a pub where the patrons
still celebrate a famous battle in that bloody history of Protestants versus
Catholics in the British Isles, and customers must perform. After rifling the wallets of the drinkers and
dancers they sing a celebratory song about the conflict, with the chorus, “No
more Catholics left,” which completely enchants the crowd, who happily join in,
dancing and rejoicing in that long ago victory, while the thieves manage to
slip away.
Although perhaps not quite so squalid and repulsive as the original, T2 Trainspotting provides some
convincing insights into ordinary life in today’s United Kingdom. It also provides a nicely opposing glimpse of
a world far removed from those genteel dramas so beloved of Anglophiles and
public television. This picture reminds
us that Ye Olde Merrie England consists of more than Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and Downton Abbey. An occasionally incomprehensible Scottish
burr replaces the refined accents of the upper classes, booze and cocaine
replace tea and crumpets, and a woman armed with a dildo replaces the polite
courtship of the upper classes: rule Britannia.
