Withnail and I: What a Piece of Work

When Withnail and I finally came to theaters the following February, the reviews were great, but the box office sluggish. Handmade had a tendency to make good films that it couldn’t sell. Who wanted to see a film with an unknown cast, set in the dying days of the sixties (a deeply unfashionable era in Thatcherite Britain, embarrassing to left and right alike), about unemployed actors? Robinson, the award-winning writer, was the closest thing to a selling point. When people saw the film, they loved it, but they didn’t want to see it. The poster, a vomit-colored malaise of furious cross-hatching and inky flyspecks by cartoonist Ralph Steadman, commissioned before Withnail and I was even greenlit, probably alienated all the right people without attracting anyone else. It’s a perfect summation of the film’s rat-infested mindset but doesn’t entirely convey why you should rush out and buy a ticket. It perhaps needs a caption saying, “Like this, but hilarious.”

It was on home video that Withnail and I acquired a loyal cult following—and inspired a downright dangerous drinking game, in which foolhardy viewers tried to match the protagonists drink for drink. (If tempted by this drink-along approach, at least skip the lighter fluid: Robinson’s flatmate drank that for real and went temporarily blind.) Years later, when I asked Robinson if he felt the film’s eventual success (culminating in its 1996 rerelease) helped him, he replied with a decisive negative: “Worst thing that could have happened.” Which may be putting it too strongly. But in an industry devoted to the latest thing, being known for something you made ages ago can be a bit of an albatross, or a millstone. Or an albatross carved from a millstone. Which is why Robinson’s directing has been intermittent (just three more features), his CV enhanced with literary work like the aforementioned Penman and the 2015 nonfiction book They All Love Jack, which examines British society through the Jack the Ripper case.

The word grotty was invented by Alun Owen for his screenplay of A Hard Day’s Night. It was originally short for grotesque, but the distaste with which George Harrison utters it in that film perfectly suits its later meaning: grimy, seedy, seamy, dirty. It fits the kitchen-sink comedy of Withnail and I, which has antecedents in the British radio and TV shows written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, such as Hancock’s Half Hour. Indeed, Tony Hancock’s misanthropic persona is a Withnail prototype: an angry young man whose rage is pathetic rather than dignified, hugging his delusions of superiority about himself. The writers would come up with wonderful stuff for their star to say, like “I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy used to move about.” That sinister moving gravy feels like it evolved into the nameless matter inhabiting Withnail and Marwood’s sink. Robinson has cited Galton and Simpson as influences, and they’re in the British DNA; you can’t escape them any more than you can escape the class you were born in.

Robinson’s debut is always praised for its script and performances but underrated for its audiovisual flair. Some of this glum panache is the happy product of poverty: “The shabbiness of Withnail helps the film,” Robinson told Alistair Owen for the collection of interviews Smoking in Bed. You can feel the film grain straining to catch a decipherable image in what the script refers to as “low-quality daylight.” But it’s also the product of the beautiful Lake District scenery, captured in terrific compositions. Is it possible to nod to Wordsworth and Keats and still be funny? Yes, apparently it’s possible. When Withnail mounts a promontory to bellow “Bastards!” into the mist it’s transcendent—and pitifully hilarious—because of just the exact way his voice cracks when he’s trying to be impressive (“I’m gonna be a star!”), and because the whole bit is the opposite of what anyone who is truly impressive would ever even attempt.

As a first-time director, Robinson enlisted his crew’s full help in suggesting angles, but he hated over-the-shoulder shots, so the movie does great, low-key work with sustained takes and never feels televisual (most British cinema in the eighties was being paid for by TV, and looked it). The music, by David Dundas and Rick Wentworth, has a lovely, tentative romanticism—like a Joe Hisaishi score for Hayao Miyazaki—that finally develops into a rollicking, broken, downhill whirl over the end titles, one of the rare times a film score saves itself for after the finish and achieves a Grand Summation. And then there are the perfect choices of rock songs, all indicated in the shooting script: King Curtis’s saxophone on “A Whiter Shade of Pale”—“so sweet . . . so sour . . . so beautiful”—and “Mr. Hendrix plays Mr. Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ ” which raises the film to an unlikely epic status.

Comedy comes from pain, some claim, and Robinson does tremendous pain. He has described his diaries from this period as bulging with hangovers, each different. “This one . . . lasted four and a half days. It gets about a page and a half, adjectives all over it,” he wrote in his 1995 introduction to the script. Withnail stares from the broken-down Jaguar that he and Marwood drive to the lakes and says, unforgettably, “I’ve got a bastard behind the eyes.” But the film is about a bigger hangover—the spiritual, sociopolitical one following the sixties—which is why the Jag rattles through Finchley, Margaret Thatcher’s constituency, a reference few would get but that Robinson particularly wanted.

As with an Ealing comedy, though, a huge part of the pleasure is in precisely drawn characters, perfectly cast, delivering lines that expose them cruelly. McGann is as beautiful and soulful as the young Robinson, but a better actor. Grant blends with his character so completely, it’s a miracle anyone else ever dared cast him afterward. The nonsmoking, allergic-to-booze Grant had to get wasted during rehearsal to generate a “sense memory” of what it was like, and developed a trick of turning his head a millisecond before his eyes moved, which had the crew convinced he must be drunk for real, until “Cut!” was declared and he sobered in an instant.

Michael Elphick—Robinson’s drama-school chum as well as a big TV star, who played the sadistic night porter in The Elephant Man—did his bit as Jake the poacher for a few quid and some booze. But the truly transplendent support comes from Richard Griffiths, as Uncle Monty, and Ralph Brown, as Danny the dealer.

Getting what he wanted was tricky for Robinson, who could hear the script in his head and knew what it needed to sound like. But actors don’t like being given line readings. Brown turned up at his audition in costume and readily embraced the vocal style suggested, borrowed from a deeply stupid makeup artist known to Robinson (“Do—you—know—what—I—mean?” said with a concussed, plodding emphasis on every word). At the first screening, Brown couldn’t believe how slowly he was speaking and became convinced that he was killing the film. But Danny’s idiocy gives Withnail and I precisely the license needed to sum up its elegiac attitude toward the sixties without embarrassing us.

Another bit of the film’s plot is Monty, Withnail’s wealthy gay uncle who provides the holiday cottage after his nephew falsely suggests that Marwood might welcome his carnal advances. Griffiths had been plucked from another Handmade film, A Private Function (1984), where he plays opposite Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. His Monty is an adorable creation. And thankfully—though Robinson’s dialogue, like his speech, casually tosses out slurs along with oaths—the director knew that casting the cuddly Griffiths defused offense. Monty isn’t predatory: he’s another victim, like all the characters, prey to Withnail’s amoral scheming.

Griffiths, seeking a way into this flamboyant and eccentric queen, first adopted a Noël Coward manner, which Robinson vetoed. He didn’t want any self-consciously comic acting. You can hear the faintest traces of that precise elocution in Monty’s first scene (“The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts”), but it’s swiftly subsumed into a wholly organic creation, and Monty lives! Tragic at his core, like the film, Monty is buoyed by his pretensions and illusions. He ought to be a dodgy, homophobic caricature—Withnail and I ought to have dated in that respect—but the reality of the character, of Griffiths’s cherubic sweetness, and of the grace notes the script gives him skips over all those possible pitfalls. He’s a product of Robinson’s radical empathy, capturing the plight of many who grew up when sex acts between men were still illegal in the UK.