On Bruce Robinson’s “Withnail and I”
Revisiting an old favorite for only the 37th time…
The movie begins with a slight misdirect. We see the protagonist — Marwood, or the “I” of the movie’s title, whichever you prefer — sitting up late at night smoking, and plainly lovesick. We know his state of mind because of the look of youthful pain on his face, and the achingly melancholy instrumental rendition of A Whiter Shade of Pale by King Curtis on the soundtrack. And we know it’s late at night because a warm yellow lamp is on.
A few moments later though, most of this goes out the window. We notice a cooler, diffuse light from the outdoors beginning to illuminate their shockingly squalid apartment, before we see an actual window, lit with the dead light of the English dawn. He’s not lovesick and having a last smoke before bed, he’s actually been up all night. And his first line of voiceover makes it clear (about a minute before he declaratively says as much) that he’s deep in the throes of a speed-induced panic attack.
Everything about these first few minutes is wonderful, in ways both masterful and clumsy: Withnail’s dual entrances, first heard growling through a door, and then loping into the room in yesterday’s clothes and pouring out the last of their wine… the early poignant suggestion of amorous pain replaced by the clear embarrassing wreckage of their young reprobate lives… the hard cut from their staircase to either the most disgusting or appealing English breakfast you’ve ever seen (depending on exactly how hungover, stoned, or drunk you are)… the abrupt end of King Curtis’ song that accompanies the previous edit in favor of the sizzle of frying eggs… and the clunky (but amphetamine-appropriate) screenplay decision to leave the apartment for exactly 52 seconds before rushing straight back for the first of Marwood’s many arguments with Withnail.
There’s a tension between the parts of this opening that play beautifully and the parts that play like a first film. Which is appropriate, because Bruce Robinson had never directed before, but his one previous screenplay credit (The Killing Fields) was nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA. I’m not highlighting any of this to snark on the film or its director — to the contrary, while a more polished version of this movie is possible, and surely would have emerged from the same material if Robinson had gotten to direct other things first, I just can’t imagine how such a film would be better. It’s a movie about two people who are barely holding it together, at the end of a promising but fraying decade, in the seat of a dying empire, going to recharge their batteries in the ruins of a country house. The rough edges in the production lend an accidental extra beauty to the product that a more seasoned approach just wouldn’t, and fit the material perfectly.
I saw this movie for the first time in college and fell in love with it instantly. It’s a perfect movie to see if you’re a young person with some big aspirations but absolutely no clue how to pursue them. And especially so if you also live in a disaster of a student apartment, and have a vaguely codependent relationship with your equally rudderless early twenties roommate. And if you have already, at 21, become worryingly adept at fending off the advances of sad, barely closeted middle aged men by pretending said advances weren’t even advances.
(And also drive a car with one dead headlight and one broken windshield wiper, I could go on — apart from not being English it’s eerie how well it synced up with the life I was leading at the time).
If I could awkwardly draw a circle around what I’m trying to say, I think part of what makes it so compelling to me so many viewings later (apart from just being authentically entertaining) is that the film is ALL jagged edges and odd juxtapositions. And yet somehow it holds together. It’s an insanely quotable comedy but shot with the painterly drear of a Ken Loach film (much to the consternation of one of its more seasoned producers). It marries a strange, neither-this-nor-that indie film score (that periodically verges on circus music) to three spectacularly ungettable tracks from Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. It invites you to feel genuine and unrestrained sympathy for a trio of truly flawed people, two of whom behave fully repulsively at various points in the film. For long stretches it feels like a haphazard collection of scenes, flung at the wall in the hopes that they’ll justify their proximity, before the film ties itself up beautifully and neatly in the last 10 minutes. It’s full to bursting with scatological language, drug use, and some particularly edgy implied sexual content, yet somehow attempts to close out the story with a Hamlet soliloquy… and lands it!
It is paradoxically, I think, a film that every aspiring filmmaker should see, but probably take no lessons from. Because it feels, correctly, like one of the all timer first films, it would be tempting to try to replicate it (write a bunch of loose, funny scenes about unbelievably dark and fraught material, and then wrap it out with a deeply emotional — and deeply pretentious — final speech in the rain). And… I think that would be a bad idea! For most people, at least. But also, I’m so glad Mr. Robinson had the maniac confidence to try it. God help us, it worked.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it has (for my money) the single best drunk performance anyone has ever put to film, but it’s not even the best performance in the movie. Richard Griffiths manages to be wickedly funny, quietly menacing, and ultimately, somehow, a figure of authentic pity. That he upstages Richard E. Grant so deftly is such an accomplishment… and then you learn that Grant’s hall of fame drunk performance was achieved and perfected not after a young lifetime of haunting pubs, but after precisely one experience being so (Grant is allergic to alcohol but agreed to overimbibe with the director just once in order to understand the character’s mental state). And as it’s described in the documentary Withnail and Us, that one experience was enough for him to hone in on the singular truth of theatrical drunkenness: to be drunk is not to act drunk, it is to try and fail to act sober.
It is also one of the best movies about friendship, albeit darkly so. It understands that most friendships are borne of proximity rather than compatibility. And that what usually matters most looking back is not who understood you best, but who was actually there. I have absolutely no idea how to get in touch with my own Withnail equivalent (the last I heard he’d moved to China, and I’ve never once seen him on social media). But contra several much calmer people from that same period (whose names I can barely remember), I think about him all the time, and with quite a bit more fondness than I’d have expected. That Bruce Robinson’s screenplay whittled down his real life late ‘60s friend group to just the titular Withnail is probably pretty telling. And at the risk of making things too pat, the ending seems to agree: in Marwood’s final moments, there’s an undisguised relief to be moving on — who can blame him — but an authentic tenderness too.
If you’re reading this in the UK, you have already seen this movie many times, as it is part of your patrimony, and you were born already knowing several of the classic lines, and you are probably a bit sick of it (my apologies). If you’re reading this in the United States however, there’s an excellent chance that you haven’t seen it at all, and maybe had not heard of it until five minutes ago. I recommend correcting this imbalance. Withnail and I is greater than the sum of its parts, richer for its fledgling errors, and really does reach for the sublime, succeeding many more times than any first film deserves to.
And if that sounds silly to say about a movie with lines like “I feel like a pig shat in my head,” then so be it.
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