T2 TRAINSPOTTING

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.