If you like what Richard E Grant is doing now – in series such as The Franchise and films like Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Saltburn – you really should see where it all began: the 1987 flop turned cult classic Withnail and I. Grant delivers a tour de force comedic performance as an alcoholic out-of-work actor living with his best mate in a squalid London flat at the tail end of 1969 who goes on a rural holiday by mistake.
It’s funnier than it sounds. In fact, Withnail and I is top-shelf comedy, with some of the finest lines and line readings available to humanity. (A personal favourite: “This place has become impossible. Perpetual rain, freezing cold and now a madman on the prowl outside with eels.”)
It didn’t play this way at the beginning: like many cult classics, Withnail and I bombed at the box office and was generally poorly reviewed, accreting fandom gradually – in this case, assisted by the spread of VCR technology. In particular, it passed like a secret handshake through students – who recognised simpatico spirits and familiar dilemmas – which I assume is how I discovered it, in the early 2000s.
I was familiar with the title and cover – it was a fixture of video stores in the 90s – but I’d somehow assumed it was too rarefied for my unrefined palate; only to discover, in my chaotic uni years, that it was a kind of spiritual homecoming. In my soul, I’m probably eternally pottering around the muddy countryside of Withnail and I, seeking beauty (and potatoes) while beset by madmen brandishing eels.
Circa 2000, Withnail and I was probably my first encounter with Grant, but with hindsight I realise it cemented the qualities that have defined his best roles in the decades since: sharp-tongued patrician hauteur interspersed with manic energy and childlike glee. It’s also a masterclass in playing drunk – all the more miraculous for the fact that he is a lifelong teetotaller.
Grant plays Withnail (pronounced “WITH-null” in the film, though curiously you only ever hear fans – even British people – pronounce the film’s title “WITH-NAIL”), an upper-crust scion with a world-class talent for drink and drugs, and a more dubious talent for acting; in his own estimation, “a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum”, thanks to his inability to secure an audition.
The titular “I” (played by Paul McGann) is Marwood: middle class, biblically beautiful, and also an actor, though mildly more successful – not only has he secured an audition, he’s about to get a callback. Like Withnail, Marwood is a prodigious drinker, but he’s less of a connoisseur of psychotropics than his friend; more a dilettante. The film opens on him in the middle of a panic attack, surrounded by the souvenirs of a speed- and booze-fuelled 60-hour bender.
This is ostensibly Marwood’s story, but from the moment Grant enters the picture around five minutes in – sepulchral in his hangover, wrapped in tailored tweed and brandishing a wine bottle – it’s clear he’s going to steal the show. “I have some extremely distressing news,” he informs Marwood. “We’ve just run out of wine.”
Writer-director Bruce Robinson based the film on his semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, drawing on his years as a struggling actor living in Camden. This is not the stylish, swinging 60s London often depicted on film, but rather a down-and-out working-class melting pot at the fag end of a decade of dissolution. The hangover is a bastard.
Marwood and Withnail, adept at dodging reality, decamp to the countryside: a holiday cottage in the Lake District owned by Withnail’s wealthy uncle Monty (the irrepressible Richard Griffiths), himself a failed thesp. Monty is also somewhat of a failed homosexual, and as we discover, Withnail has secured the keys to the cottage by offering up his unsuspecting friend as an amuse-bouche. When Monty arrives at the cottage looking to claim his prize, the wheels of the already rickety wagon fall well and truly off.
None of this plays out in the way you’d expect, which is really the strength of all the best films and certainly the best comedies. Writing from his own life – including his experiences of predatory older gay men in the clubs and casting couches of 60s London – Robinson is humanistic, even tender, and never glib. Monty is no monster. Even Withnail, a paragon of patrician entitlement, is more damaged child than diabolical fiend. And Marwood is no angel: we come to see that he has an exploitative instinct every bit as ruthless as his friend’s.
Withnail and I is foremost a comedy, but the film’s enduring emotional power lies in its devastating portrayal of a friendship that has tipped from intoxicating high into melancholic low. Marwood, as ambitious as his friend but more pragmatic, moves on – leaving us with the ambivalent sense that this is both necessary and a betrayal. But as with all trips, don’t let the inevitable comedown put you off going on the sublime and often ridiculous journey.
Withnail and I is available to stream on Prime Video in Australia, Channel 4 in the UK and Max in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
