In the words of its writer and director, Withnail and I is a comedy that “doesn’t know it’s funny”. To its star, it’s about “the nobility of failure”. It ends with its title character alone in the rain, his one friend gone, delivering a Hamlet soliloquy to an indifferent wolf. It’s my feelgood movie.
Bruce Robinson’s British classic was released in 1987. He and Richard E Grant made the remarks above in 2007, at the British Film Institute. I was there, eager to hear Robinson discuss a movie based on his own experience. Themes abide. As he said recently about The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, his imperishable novel about his brutal childhood: “It’s very funny but also sad as fuck.” Robinson’s first film was a novel before it was a screenplay. At the BFI, he said he knew he’d got his film right at an early screening, when a “girl sort of threw up, laughing”. She had a point. Withnail and I is beautifully, awfully funny.
It’s based on Robinson’s life in London in the 1960s. Two actors live in drink and squalor. One has a rich uncle with a house in the country, in the cold and distant north. The actors go there, swapping urban despair for rural horror. The uncle arrives, and attempts to seduce his nephew’s friend. The actors return to London, to find a drug dealer asleep in their flat. One actor gets a job. He cuts his hair and leaves.
As the late Kevin Jackson wrote: “Try pitching that one to Dreamworks.” But there’s more to the film than action and plot. Jackson also noted Robinson’s mastery, how Withnail is a “classic three-acter as outlined by Ring Lardner. Act One: Send a man up a tree. Act Two: Throw rocks at him. Act Three: Bring him down.”
Almost all of Robinson’s lines are funny. Not one is meant as a joke. The actors excel, precisely to Robinson’s direction. As Withnail, Grant is flailing, vicious, amoral. As Marwood (as Robinson), Paul McGann is beautiful, soused and naive. As Uncle Monty, Richard Griffiths is technically and physically immense, oozing pathos as well as weirdly Bunterish threat.
My brother bought Withnail back from Blockbuster. I was 16, keeping a diary, Marwood-esque, full of artful despair. My uncle was visiting, making dinner. If not Monty-esque, he was certainly a lovable rogue.
We watched. Spellbound, we rewound the VHS and watched it over again. I loved Dylan and Hendrix on the soundtrack but I loved King Curtis and Al Bowlly too. I loved Robinson’s lines and how his actors said them. I loved the moments of surreality – Monty’s house of potted vegetables, the policeman’s sudden shout – and the flashes of slapstick: Withnail nicked for drunk driving, failing to work the piss-filled device in his trousers. I loved how Grant found space for such physical comedy in Robinson’s beautiful script.
The tape went back to Blockbuster. I bought my own. I took it to college and watched it drunk and sober, with friends and alone, in halls and in my desperate pit of a house.
Through early adulthood, into fatherhood, on DVD then streaming. To watch Withnail is to discover it again. Back home in the north with my brothers, walking the hills where we scattered our dad’s ashes, we repeat Robinson’s lines as a sort of catechism, swearwords said with vim. Our uncle is gone too.
I haven’t quoted Robinson’s script here. Too obvious. One for the college bar bores. But I will let Robinson quote himself. In 2017, he and Grant returned to the BFI.
The actor Withnail was based on, Vivian MacKerrell, never found much work. Like Marwood, Robinson found some. Uncle Monty is based on Franco Zeffirelli, the great director who cast Robinson in Romeo and Juliet, flew him to Rome, and promptly tried to seduce him.
“There’s just me and him on the sofa,” Robinson said, audience, interviewer and Grant just trying to hold it together. “‘What do you want to drink?’ ‘Bit of whisky.’ And he leans over to me and says, ‘Are you a sponge, or a stone?’”
In the film, Monty says that to Marwood. At the BFI when I was there, it got the biggest laugh. On film, Marwood tells Monty: “I voted Conservative.” On Zeffirelli’s sofa, Robinson said: “Bit of both, Franco.”
Then he gave the smile he gave his would-be seducer: a shit-scared grin, half-polite, half-panicked, eyes searching for escape, as indelibly played by McGann.
Robinson brought the house down. Bliss.
Withnail and I is available on Max and the Criterion channel in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK
