The Great Movies III

The performance by Richard E. Grant is a tour de force. Withnail & I was his second film. IMDb lists more than eighty other credits, but it is his destiny to be forever linked with this early role that has become iconic. To this day there must be those who imagine Grant himself to be hostile and furious, yet in person, he is just another talented acting bloke. Withnail could possibly have become a comic drunk in the wrong hands. Richard E. Grant never, ever, not for a second, breaks character; he is relentlessly wounded and aggressive. He never goes too far, he never relaxes, he aims at the end of the movie and charges.

Paul McGann, as Marwood, reflects a tenuous grip on reality. And he makes the right choices in the role; he doesn't play a straight man or a sparring partner, but a fellow trekker on a daily journey to oblivion. He retains shreds of common sense. When Withnail snatches a can of lighter fluid and squirts it down his throat, Marwood is horrified. When Withnail starts looking for antifreeze, Marwood cries out: "Don't mix your drinks!" Incredibly, not even this scene is invented; Vivian MacKerrell did drink lighter fluid and went blind for several days; Robinson thinks that may have contributed to his death from throat cancer at fifty-one.'That, and his smoking. Withnail smokes as if his cigarette is the source of life.

Their sojourn in the country cottage is the centerpiece. They are hopelessly inadequate for such tasks as building a fire and cooking, and our last sight of a rooster being placed in the oven is not one we shall soon forget. They have difficulties with the locals, including the poacher who is accused by Withnail in a pub: "You've got an eel down your leg!"

Uncle Monty comes to visit and grows amorous toward Marwood: "I mean to have you even if it must be burglary!" Robinson says this advance was inspired by the romantic overtures of Franco Zeffirelli when he was playing Benvolio in his Romeo and Juliet. Richard Griffith is wonderful in the role, plummy and insinuating, self-effacing in an affected way. (Withnail says, "Monty used to act," and he replies: "I'd hardly say that. It's true I crept the boards in my youth, but I never had it in my blood.")

The dialogue is famous and quoted; in the UK, certain lines are widely recognized. "I can't get my boots on when they're hot,""Those are the kind of windows faces look in at," "I have been known to weep in butchers' shops," "Warm up? We may as well sit round this cigarette," "My thumbs have gone weird!" and Danny the drug dealer's "Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight."

Danny (Ralph Brown) has dialogue that speaks to the bottom line of the movie: "We are ninety-one days away from the end of the r96os, the greatest decade in human history."the film is a time capsule, not least because booze is more central than drugs, although Danny's theory of the politics of uppers and downers is prophetic. Withnail and Marwood share the delusion that release and elation can be found in a bottle. If you asked them if it made them happy to drink, they would probably claim that it did, and that's why they do it.

Well, maybe not Withnail. For reasons remaining obscure and certainly never mentioned by him, he seems to be courting suicide. He pours bottles down his throat, sucks on cigarettes, alienates the world, always looks enraged. At the end of the film, he has a famous scene when he stands in the rain beside a fence and performs the Hamlet soliloquy including, "What a piece of work is a man!" He is one of the rare characters in modern films who can quote it with accuracy about himself.

That scene reflects on a quality in the film: Withnail, Marwood, and Monty, for that matter, are well educated, steeped in literature and drama, and so their speech is not sodden but shows intelligence and wit even in the worst of times. (Marwood, after being threatened by a man in a pub: "I don't consciously offend big men like this. And this one has a decided imbalance of hormone in him. Get any more masculine than that and you'd have to live up a tree.")

Why does the film, which I have made sound so depressing, remain so popular after more than twenty years? It achieves a kind of transcendence in its gloom. It is uncompromisingly, sincerely itself. It is not a lesson or a lecture, it is funny but in a consistent way that it earns, and it is unforgettably acted. Bruce Robinson saw such times, survived them, and remembers them not with bitterness but fidelity. In Withnail, he creates one of the iconic figures in modern films. Most of us may have known someone like Withnail. It is likely that Withnail never knew someone like us. His mind was elsewhere.