Everything in the world of Danny Boyle seems at once dark, decaying, and shining with an unfathomable luster. He often exposes his characters to inauspicious conditions, to situations admitting no happy resolution, to encounters that incite every lamentable emotion a young...
[more]Everything in the world of Danny Boyle seems at once dark, decaying, and shining with an unfathomable luster. He often exposes his characters to inauspicious conditions, to situations admitting no happy resolution, to encounters that incite every lamentable emotion a young mind can imagine.
For some reason, though, it's not all that bad. In fact, it's hilarious and undeniably hip. The state of affairs may be ugly, but the sense rising out Boyle's films is essentially affirmative. They excrete a kind of pleasure from the pores of their terminally acned skin.
Boyle is best known for "Trainspotting" (1996), his take on Irvine Welsh's celebrated novel of the same name. He admits that the project, which catapulted him onto the world stage, at first intimidated him: the danger of botching a book as good as Welsh's was a substantial burden. But, with a keen sense for translating Welsh's world into film, Boyle captures all the horror and splendor of post-Thatcher Edinburgh's dead-end slums, and the disgruntled and drug-addled youth who inhabit them.
Boyle is fascinated by group dynamics. As "Trainspotting" follows the efforts of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) to break free of this milieu, it simultaneously develops the perverse allure of the scene he's immersed in: this crowd may be belligerent, depressed, self-deprecating, and drug-addicted, but at least they haven't sold out to the banality of middle-class routine, and they maintain an intense loyalty to their friends. With everything seeming hopeless and increasingly depraved, Renton runs through a series of misadventures, by turns comic and tragic, in which betrayal is the only way out. But Boyle has set everything up so that this betrayal is in fact a rather uplifting event.
Before "Trainspotting," Boyle had taken up a corresponding theme -- the disintegration of the group dynamic --in "Shallow Grave." The unexpected death of a new housemate, and the large sum of money the others find on him, incites a fit of madness that touches everyone involved. But once again there is a sense of frolic and pleasurable frenzy in all of this -- the surface of the film teems with an irrepressible ebullience. Boyle's more recent projects show the same spirit: "A Life Less Ordinary" (1997) casts Ewan McGregor as a cleaning man who goes on a rampage when he's replaced by a robot; the protagonist of "The Beach" (Leonardo DiCaprio) is addicted to pop music, video games, war movies, and nicotine. But none of these provides him the ultimate escape from the doldrums of modern life, which he finds (he thinks) on an island paradise off Thailand.
Black comedy is Boyle's way out of the dark and involute world of postmodernity. You can't help but feel, after watching his films, that it's a pretty good solution to what would otherwise be an intolerable state of affairs. Perhaps the words of R.E.M. express better than anything his pervasive sentiment: "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."
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