'Living like this is a full-time business.'

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 2010)

Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting is a novel born of the dirt and grit it depicts. Disturbing and violent at times and explicit on all counts, it would have been a tough story to film had Danny Boyle not gotten a hold of the project himself and delivered one of the most stunning films in history, his official debut to the film world and the public at large.
This is a story about choice, the story is so timeless that it's almost hard to believe that a film with such intense and seemingly vile subject matter can be made so accessible to any viewer.
This is a film that needs to be seen plain and simple. It is not 'drug propaganda' as some nuts will tell you. Those people have not even bothered to see the film, and there is nothing more annoying than false assumption. The film is not a glamorised account of the sad, pathetic lives and times of the junkies—never is it once made appealing or even ideal—for how can it be so?. How many of you are actually enticed by soiling the bed (and an entire kitchen) with faeces? How many of you are willing to take a nasty, surreal dive into what is perhaps the most vile, unkempt public toilet in all of Scotland?
Trainspotting is a story that manages to be both sweet and humorous, as well as gripping and horrifying. Most of all, it is profound and honest. There are as many sick moments as there are funny ones, and Welsh's novel is so brilliantly transferred into a finely crafted screenplay that it fully explores the different sides of the lives of all of these characters with an apt ease and most importantly (some might say shockingly) a sense of respect; there is as much pain as there is joy, and there is as much filth as there is cleanliness—or at the very least, an attempt at it.
The story is realistic and the accounts are accurate. The characters are all distinct and memorable that it is impossible to watch this and not have them touch you, humour you or disgust you in such different ways, for this is not a story about sympathy. It is a tale of life and of choice, of celebration even under the darkest of circumstances, and of journeys in and out of the abyss that may or may not be successful or worth it—worth the time, worth the money, worth the effort, worth the pain.
The uncertainties of life are so beautifully captured that it makes one feel that no one but Boyle could have handled such challenging material themselves.
Trainspotting will never lose its place in my heart or in the public consciousness. It has often been hailed as a classic, and deservedly so, as it is one of the best films to come out of 1990s.