Withnail & I

Lots of Spoilers!

All right, this is the plan. We get in there and get wrecked, then we'll eat a pork pie, then we'll drop a couple of Surmontil-50's each. That means we'll miss out Monday but come up smiling Tuesday morning.

You find yourself with your uncle's wad of currency to buy some much needed boots to manage the uncultivated countryside and instead you blow it on ale? You sit and bitch about fellow thespians who've received parts for which they're so richly undeserving? Your flat's kitchen sink is a cesspool?

Camden, London. 1969. Withnail and "I" (Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann) are unemployed actors with concerns that barely reach past how they will stay warm that afternoon. Alcohol fuels Withnail's loathing of the entire human race, and how convenient is it that the local pubs have heating!

"I", the film's narrator, is never given a name onscreen (the film's screenplay identifies him as Marwood). He is the more passive of the pair, resigned to listen and tag along with any of Withnail's pursuits. The first half hour of the endlessly quotable 1986 cult classic WITHNAIL AND I rather splendidly inhabits their downtrodden existence of filth and defeat. They're almost like distant cousins of the GREY GARDENS mother and daughter.

As the pair steal away and meet Withnail's eccentric and flamingly gay uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), they decide some time away from London is what the doctor ordered. Roughing it in the country requires strangling your own chickens and other earthy skills if one must eat - completely lost on our boys. They also have no money until Monty arrives unexpectedly. Things do not improve with his visit, as he has designs on Marwood, leading to more than one awkward moment. This holiday is anything but.

Their trip back to London is eventful, with Withnail's attempts at driving (he's intoxicated, of course, and has no license). His efforts to give the police someone else's urine in a test ends in arrest. Things do not improve for Withnail when they return to the flat, with squatting drug dealers in the bathtub and a letter that will cause Marwood to leave for a plum audition greeting him. Withnail, now alone, in the final scene, will be quoting Hamlet to animals at the zoo.

WITHNAIL AND I understands habitual drinking better than most works of fiction I've seen or read. When a bad habit becomes a lifestyle, something as natural as breathing. I spent my 20s flailing many a night among bars, my very schedule worked around opportunities for inbibing and the necessary recovery time. I was not quite the sot as is Withnail, but I recognized the mindset.

You might rightly argue that "mindset" is the wrong word choice. The times I've watched this movie, I was reminded of an insightful article I had once read, from Movieline magazine I believe: "Why Actors Drink". Like fish to water. Who would choose a life of certain rejection, constant self-esteem erosion? Just for brief periods of applause? Alcohol is the lubricant of healing, the assuager of the bruised ego. But also, the worst enemy of the sort who aspires to stir the hearts of the Great Unwashed public who sometimes part with their money to see them. Could Withnail live with or without the sauce?

Writer/director Bruce Robinson based his screenplay on his own experiences in the late 1960s and his telling is indeed quite telling. He's created a classic comedy of errors that is just as interested in the melancholy of the scenario, perhaps even moreso. His film is riotously funny but is primarily a wounded love poem to the poisons of ferment.

Oddly, I was also reminded of a quote from Van Halen past and current frontman David Lee Roth, who stated that he doesn't much like jogging "because the ice cubes keep bouncing out of my glass". That does get a bit to the essence of these characters, but there is redemption in this story, for one of them.

Marwood, in the final scenes, will cut his hair and exit the haze to move on, to perhaps find a more mature environment, a new stage of life. But not before the druggies and rumheads in his apartment offer commentary on the 1960s, the "greatest decade in the history of mankind". It seems to be a fitting goodbye in many ways. Withnail in say, by 1971 may be a tragic sight, indeed.

What a piece of work is this man!