Withnail and I

Withnail and I (1987) is a British comedy directed by Bruce Robinson. Apparently, the film has a cult status in England -- a DVD extra includes interviews with young men who have seen the film 30 or 35 times. The picture is proof, as someone says on the DVD "making of" documentry, that you don't need a plot or much money to create a memorable movie. Withnail is a flamboyant, reckless drunk at wit's end because he and his roommate are out of booze and can't afford drugs. Both protagonists are young men who are out of work actors. Withnail has a homosexual uncle. He implies that his roommate -- who narrates the film (the "I" in the title) -- will sleep with the old queen if he will lend them his car (and some cash) for a trip to the country. To the tune of Jimi Hendrix' version of All Along the Watchtower, the two main characters drive north to the Uncle's derelect country home where they terrorize the locals and wreak general havoc. Uncle Monty shows up with food for a feast and aggressively pursues the roommate. Everyone is drunk all of the time. Fleeing Monty, the two heros return to their hideously squalid flat in London only to find that it has been appropriated by their drug dealer and his friend, a huge black man. The drug dealer and Withnail together with the black man smoke an enormous joint. The roommate gets an acting job and departs, in the rain, saying goodbye to Withnail. The two men part in front of some kind of small menagerie in a public park -- Withnail recites a soliloquy from Hamlet ("What a piece of work man is!" and walks away in the grey drizzle -- the camera shows this through the mesh of a wire cage holding a bedraggled-looking wolf, implying that Withnail remains uncaged and free (although probably doomed by his addictions) while the hero is now confined by a paying job. The film has some of the atmosphere of a Mike Leigh picture, some of the fantastically bombastic and slang-ridden dialogue (it is very hard for an American to understand) seems improvised although much of it so stylized and intricate in diction that it must have been carefully written and rehearsed. I didn't know anything about the film and so didn't really understand that it was a comedy until I watched the extras on the DVD. The acting in the film is so compelling that, at first, I took the picture for some kind of witty, but bleak, depiction of the travails of alcoholism and substance abuse -- sort of a Brit Lost Weekend. The film starts at a peak of hysteria that would end most pictures about addiction -- the heros paranoically think themselves menaced by a giant rat in the apartment, the power is shut off and they are freezing, and Withnail is so desperate for booze that he drinks something that seems to be lighter fluid. It's certainly funny but horrific and the cluttered, filthy sets are ghastly, dank, and chaotic. The scenes involving the old homosexual are acted with such conviction that they assume a tragic edge -- the old man's lust for the film's narrator has a pathetic dimension. I suppose that it is the confusion that the film induces in the viewer -- you don't know whether to be amused or appalled -- that makes the picture memorable. The soundtrack featuring Voodoo Chile and King Curtis playing a cover of A whiter shade of Pale (as well as the Beatles While my guitar gently weeps -- George Harrison was one of the producers of the picture) also accounts for the powerful impression that the picture makes. Withnail is abominable, cowardly, incredibly eloquent, and doomed. (There's all sorts of fascinating lore about this film on Wikipedia: apparently, the director selected the King Curtis song because it was widely believed that the musician was murdered on the night he recorded the tune; the movie was based on an unpublished novel by Robinson that ended with Withnail drinking whiskey from a shotgun barrel and, then, pulling the trigger; there is a popular drinking game in England -- when someone has a drink in the film, you take the same drink, substituting overproof gin for the lighter fluid -- this game has resulted in some fatalities since the amount of liquor consumed in the movie it taken during the two hour picture would kill anyone.)