Scotch Take

Now that we've seen Liam Neeson cozy up to a dead cow in Rob Roy, and Mel Gibson wield his ax in Braveheart, what's so strange about seeing a bunch of Edinburgh lads shoot heroin in Trainspotting? Plenty, as American audiences will discover this month when this latest Scottish high arrives Stateside. Dark and smart, with blasphemous humor to spare, Trainspotting makes no concessions to middle-class anxieties. "Choose life. Choose a job_Choose a fucking big television," as the film's unlikely hero, Mark Renton, played with brilliance and pasty thinness by Ewan McGregor, rants in the opening sequence. Since its London debut in February, Trainspotting has been scoring with audiences while agitating critics. "It's now as big as Dumb and Dumber, as I'm fond of saying," reports Scottish producer Andrew Macdonald, who made the film, with English director Danny Boyle and Scottish screenwriter John Hodge, for a scant $2.3 million. The threesome, who came to prominence with last year's stylish sleeper Shallow Grave, goes further with this lucid adaptation of an arcane book about a bunch of contempo wasters. There's Sick Boy and Spud, Tommy and Begbie, but it's Renton who stands out and saves the film from being a terminal downer. In one very funny scene he's observed diving into a filthy toilet bowl after a misguided opium suppository. Despite the array of needles, Trainspotting is strangely uplifting—"life-enhancing," as Boyle says. Meanwhile, Miramax is hoping for another Pulp Fiction, and Macdonald, Hodge, and Boyle say they'll reunite this fall for a $ 10 million romance called A Life Less Ordinary.

CATHY HORYN

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