猜火车 Trainspotting review by CHARLES TAYLOR

"trainspotting" is that rarity: a movie that arrives bearing the imprimatur of hip and turns out to live up to all of the advance hype. The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, "Trainspotting" is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.

After what's been passing for hip these past few months (stinkers like the smugly superior "Fargo," which has no use for people except to hold them up to ridicule, or the loathsome "I Shot Andy Warhol," out of the Rupert Pupkin school of thought in which talented people are punished for not paying attention to the psychotic flotsam they attract), "Trainspotting" is a bracing slap in the face. This brutal, scalding comedy about junkies and street kids in working-class Edinburgh is hilarious, appalling and startling, often at the same time. It's also shrewdly humane. Nobody gets off the hook in "Trainspotting" (figuratively or literally), but it never descends into moralism or judgment. It balances the laughs and impudence of junkie good times with the waste and numbed-out horror of junkie bad times. You walk out exhilarated by its bravado and artistry, even though the wind has been knocked out of you.

The triumph of this Scottish movie, which has been a huge hit all over the U.K., is surprising on two counts. The director, Danny Boyle, and the screenwriter, John Hodge, are the team that made last year's "Shallow Grave," a picture that just about defined the dead end that affectless hipness and affectless brutality have brought indie cinema to. "Shallow Grave" was about Boyle and Hodge flaunting style and attitude; "Trainspotting" is about how they've developed technique and sensibility.

The other surprise here has to do with the source Boyle and Hodge are working from, the enormously successful first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the most entertaining of the heralded new Scottish novelists. "Trainspotting" reads like a cross between Colin MacInnes' "Absolute Beginners" and "A Clockwork Orange." Welsh's prose is dialogue-driven, encrusted with phonetic transcriptions of Scottish dialect and slang, and it doesn't take long to get into the rhythms of the characters' speech. There's barely a scene, though, that doesn't go on for too long. And while Welsh, who has a small part as a dealer in the film, pointedly avoids preaching about the dangers of heroin (as if we didn't know), he's susceptible to another sort of moralism. He can't resist sharing the junkie rationalization of using as a logical reaction to the plastic, stifling straight world. Here's his protagonist, Mark Renton (a.k.a. Rents):

Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffin in junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total in embarrassment tae the selfish, ed-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Hodge's screenplay knocks the stuffing out of that passage, recasting it ironically, and Boyle sets so relentless a pace that there's no chance for moralism to take root. "Trainspotting" opens with Renton (Ewan McGregor) doing a voice-over version of that speech while he and his pal, geeky, gawky Spud (Ewen Bremner), dash down the street pursued by security guards who've caught them shoplifting. It's a guttersnipe variation on the opening of "A Hard Day's Night," where the Beatles are pursued by their fans. Renton's speech begins to move to the dual rhythms of his hurtle along the pavement and Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," which hammers out on the soundtrack. A minute later, we're in a flat watching Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), whose bleached blond hair and suavity make him just a bit better-looking than his small-timer status should allow, prepare a shot for Allison (Susan Vidler). The look on her face as he injects her -- a shock-flash of pleasure so overwhelming it's agonizing, and the long release that follows as she says, ?hat beats any in' cock in the world" -- could sum up the movie.

As "Drugstore Cowboy" did, "Trainspotting" has the audacity to suggest the pleasures of junk. (And for that, Boyle and Hodge have endured a firestorm of criticism, from the Cannes Film Festival board to Newsweek, for allegedly "glamorizing" heroin.) Like soldiers and journalists too hooked on the adrenalin of war to settle back into civilian life, Renton can't take the nerve-scraping slowness of life without heroin. There's a shot of Renton during one of his clean periods in the local pub with his mum and dad, sitting stone still at the table, staring into his beer while people rush around him in fast motion. How could the world of mortgage payments and pub sing-songs and Saturday night bingo ever equal that sweet, devastating rush? And Boyle and Hodge don't miss what Welsh finally, I think, does: the narcissism and childishness and selfishness of that approach to life. Or, as John Waters recently put it on "The Tonight Show," "Politicians always wonder why people take drugs. It's easy. People have lots of problems. They take drugs, they have one problem."

There's barely a scene in this movie where Boyle and Hodge allow us the certainty or comfort of one reaction, even those with the psychotic Begbie (Robert Carlyle), whose buffoonery makes him no less frightening. There's a moving scene where Spud, a hilarious, stick-figured sad sack in most scenes, sits in a pub after a friend's funeral and croons a song about boyhood to his dead mate. Renton's buzzcut might be nerve endings snapping to attention from the skag coursing through his veins, even when he's temporarily clean and working as a realtor in London, pushing apartments with "all mod cons" to yuppie clients. But the protectiveness you feel for him is constantly undercut by his watchful, intent caginess, his unshakeable dedication to junk, his ability to rationalize whatever harm he does to himself or anyone else and Boyle's unerring knack for bringing Renton's unintended victims into focus.

I can't recall the last time I've seen a picture that kept pulling the rug out from under you the way this one does. Every action has a consequence here -- the movie unfolds as if Rube Goldberg had set out to tell a moral parable about drug culture. A practical joke that Renton plays on his pal, poor, simple, trusting, nonusing Tommy (Kevin McKidd), winds up costing Tommy his girlfriend. Desolate, Tommy offers to pay Renton to shoot him up, and Renton, needing money to score, agrees, getting Tommy hooked. Boyle shows us terrible things, shocking things, even, in one scene, the corpse of Allison's baby daughter, dead from neglect. But he's not out to rub our noses in what he shows us. It's crucial we see the little girl's dead, staring face; she's the one character who has no choice in her fate, a casualty of everyone else's self-involvement.

Boyle and his cinematographer Brian Tufano come up with almost as many visual strategies to tell this story as Renton and his pals come up with scams to stay high. By now, it's not just a cliche to complain about MTV's influence on the movies, it's lazy. Rock video has been around long enough for directors to transform its rapid cutting and pop-expressionist imagery into visual shorthand, much as Godard did with jump-cutting. "Trainspotting" is the most convincing case yet made that rock-video sensibility can be used for the purposes of art. (It's also one of the best uses of a rock score ever.)

Boyle really lets loose here in a couple of expressionist sequences, one where Renton dives headfirst into a filthy toilet to retrieve two opium suppositories only to emerge beneath the ocean's surface where the evacuated drugs gleam like gems on the sea floor. And the mind-boggling section where Renton's parents lock him in his bedroom to go cold turkey as he imagines the trains on his childhood wallpaper chugging past him, his parents on a game show answering questions about HIV infection and the dead baby girl crawling along the ceiling, pausing to stare at him accusingly. The sequence makes you feel like you're suffering the tortures of the damned, even as you're marveling at how it's put together.

It's a paradox that a movie as unsparing as "Trainspotting" can seem like a sign of hope. It does, because Boyle, Hodge and their actors are capturing a milieu and a way of life that's never made it to the screen before; they set the movies on their ear with the excitement and brash confidence that young artists have always assumed to announce their arrival. This genuinely hip movie stays true to its world without losing sight of the larger one. Like the rathole apartments where Renton and his mates fix and kick and OD, in "Trainspotting" there isn't a mod con in sight.

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