Withnail and I

Kevin Jackson

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839021206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Kevin Jackson recounts that experience in addition to giving a full account of the film's production. But chiefly he analyses the mood and magic of the film, its aesthetics and sensibility, seeking to show, without ever detracting from the film's comic brilliance, just how much more there is to Withnail & I than drunkenness and swearing. 'It is an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship, ' Jackson writes, 'a bleak up-ending of the English pastoral dream, a piece of ferocious verbal inventiveness' - and, without question, one of the greatest of all British films.

1 A Terrible Cult?

The Prosecution

Far from being a Modern Classic, Withnail & I is an embarrassment. Worse: it is a disgrace. The only viewers who find it funny are impressionable adolescents of all ages, from college freshers to sorry nostalgists for the 1960s – pretty much the same gregarious (from grex, gregis: ‘herd’) men, for they are almost always male, who dote on scenes and routines from Monty Python or The Young Ones, and can quote chunks of them by heart, to the boredom of everyone save their equally tiresome friends. It is hardly surprising that the most influential article on the film appeared not in Sight and Sound or Film Comment, but in the first issue of Loaded magazine, that vade mecum of louts; for its humour is of the basest order, and turns chiefly on drunkenness, foul language and reactionary stereotypes.

Seldom conspicuously well informed about world cinema, let alone any other art form, Withnail fans celebrate their fetish object not merely by numbingly repetitive viewings of the video, but with more offensive rites. They play the puerile Withnail drinking game, which consists of matching their hero’s consumption of drink, drugs and lighter fluid, hit for hit, as the tape or DVD plays on to alcoholic oblivion for all. They stage ragged pilgrimages to its Lake District locations, leaving those sites vandalised, plundered and strewn with crushed beer cans. They drive around town centres screaming Scrubbers! at alarmed female pedestrians, or bellow What fucker said that? across otherwise tranquil pubs, as though there were some shred of wit in such yobbery.

At the heart of this callow cult is a work of unusual thematic slightness and imperceptible cinematic flair – all but plotless, little more than a plumped-up anecdote of wasted time, pretentiously masquerading as confessional art. Heavily autobiographical, yet bereft of the Wordsworthian shaping spirit which turns personal memory into public narrative, it is the debut work of a director who had never previously exposed a foot of film, and freely admitted his lack of all relevant technical knowledge. Intensely wordy, and almost devoid of those rhythms and pleasures peculiar to visual storytelling, it is more like a self-indulgent fringe play than a true film. Overacted to a fault, it is peopled by caricatures worthy of a Carry On farce, and shares that direly unamusing series’ lamentable politics of gender, nation and race.

To admit to a liking for Withnail & I is to declare oneself unfit for adult company. It is a sad trifle, an aberration, an immature folly, to be outgrown and then forgotten.

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Harsh words. Uncomfortably telling, too, at least in parts.

So here is a correspondingly brief statement of the opposite point of view.

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The Defence

Withnail & I is perhaps the funniest, and possibly the most profound, comedy ever produced by the British cinema: as deliciously raucous, silly and fundamentally innocent as a vehicle for George Formby or Will Hay, yet as elegiac as Chekhov. (‘I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow.’) It is, at the very least, worthy of mention alongside the admirable likes of Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, if …, Topsy Turvy, Whisky Galore, The Rebel … and, if you will, its HandMade stable-mate, Monty Python’s Life of Brian; and it is, one may argue, superior to all of them in the sheer, gorgeous virtuosity of Bruce Robinson’s writing. Its dialogue, which bristles with pungent idiosyncrasies of diction and beautifully crafted invective, invites the adjective ‘Wildean’, particularly when one remembers that Wilde’s genius was both for the turning of a natty epigram and for the meticulous building of scene and character in such a way that the humblest word, rightly spoken, can bring the house down.

Other aspects of the film bear comparison with writers still more canonical than Wilde. Its minor characters – Uncle Monty, Danny – are gloriously memorable grotesques, creepily solipsistic yet weirdly attractive, as vividly imagined as anything in Dickens (one of Bruce Robinson’s two main literary heroes). Withnail himself is an immortal comic creation worthy of comparison – in his bibulousness, his gluttony, his snobbery, his pomposity, his cowardice, his vanity, his near-Stalinist knack for rewriting history so as to put himself in the most heroic light – to Falstaff. (Shakespeare is Robinson’s other, greater hero.) Skilfully conjured in the screenplay, the characters are superbly realised by the actors on the screen, and especially by the two leads: no wonder Richard E. Grant was soon snapped up by Altman, Coppola and Scorsese.

The film’s technical execution, at every level, is at the very least precisely thought through, at its best flawless. Robinson had honed the script to the point where he knew exactly how each line should be read, and refused to allow his cast the smallest latitude in adjusting stress patterns or vocabulary. (Not ‘Out of the car, please, Sir’, but ‘Out of the car. Please. Sir.’¹ In the matter of enforcing dramatic punctuation, Robinson’s peers are Pinter and Beckett.) He had visualised each scene so clearly in advance that his technicians were never in any doubt as to the effect that was required, and he held tenaciously to his vision even as the producers were screaming at him that the shots were unwatchably dark and the comedy non-existent, ‘as funny as cancer’. The completed film teems with unostentatious but deeply pleasing visual grace notes.

Like all the greatest comedy, the film is far more than a machine for extracting laughter. Like almost all comedies since Plautus, and certainly the vast majority of British comedies, it draws some of its biting exuberance from the friction of class against class. ‘Look here. My cousin’s a QC.’ And it is about adolescence – that peculiarly protracted adolescence known only in rich nations. One reason why college students are justified in loving it is because it is such a heartfelt account of their own day-to-day experiences, as well as the dismal lives many of them fear are waiting for them later in their twenties, when school is finally done.

At one extreme, the film both revels in and shudders at the dubious joys of anarchic binge drinking, revolting levels of domestic filth, prodigious feats of sloth. At the other, it feelingly portrays the intensity and insecurity of late adolescent friendships – are these the people I am going to be stuck with for the rest of my life? – the dread of loneliness, directionlessness and humiliating, total failure in ‘the terrible years in your twenties’.

Substantial as these themes are, the film casts its net still wider. Most obviously it is a film about the end of the 1960s, and a corrective to the usual daft images through which that decade is evoked. But Withnail is also – crucially – timeless: less a film about the end of the Youth decade than about the end of Youth itself. At its core is a very old story; maybe the oldest there is. As Bruno Bettelheim and plenty of less august thinkers before him have pointed out, the essential subject of all fairy tales is growing up; when secular drama came along, it frequently took over the burden, as for instance in the two Shakespeare plays which most haunt Withnail, Hamlet and Henry IV Part II.

Later still, with the Romantics, prose fiction inherited this grand theme of spiritual growth to maturity, and refined it into what became known as the Bildungsroman – the ‘novel of development’, which shows just how the man or woman who wrote the book grew up to become the man or woman who wrote the book. Examples include: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (like Withnail, a tale of young actors; Wim Wenders made a very loose adaptation of it in Wrong Movement), Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (to this day, Robinson keeps a quotation from Joyce pasted up above his typewriter) and Dickens’s David Copperfield – a copy of which can be seen in Marwood’s suitcase as he prepares to leave Withnail behind forever. And though Withnail and I may be a couple of piss-artists, they are also a couple of artists, possibly quite gifted ones.

Before adapting his autobiographical material into the screenplay and film we now know, Bruce Robinson wrote Withnail as just such a development-novel, and has since published The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman – note the Joycean surname, from Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake – which fills in the picture of ‘I’ as a very confused teenager. These are the two pieces, he says, of which he is most proud. His pride is fully justified, for Withnail is among other things a fine example of the Bildungsfilm, a genre rare in the British commercial cinema (exceptions include Hope and Glory), though less so in its subsidised counterpart: see the autobiographical shorts and features of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies. Withnail’s more celebrated overseas cousins include the ‘Antoine Doinel’ series of François Truffaut (for whom Robinson acted in L’Histoire d’Adèle H), Fellini’s I vitelloni and Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

A good deal more might be said. For the time being, the defence will rest by stressing, once more, how very comfortably this film maudit, this darling of lagered-up oiks and boors, will also fit into sober canons of excellence. It is an outstandingly touching yet witheringly unsentimental drama of male friendship (friendship in all its full horror, one might say), a bleak up-ending of the English pastoral dream, a piece of ferocious verbal inventiveness in which unabashedly recondite literary allusions sparkle in the knockabout farce like emeralds in the mud.

To pronounce oneself immune to the charms of Withnail & I is to declare oneself a philistine, a Puritan and a snob.

————

I write in vigorous support of the second position: to praise Withnail & I almost without reservation, though emphatically not to bury it in the marmoreal respectability of Modern Classic status. It is a good thing that the film is being taught as a set text in universities; it is also a good thing that it is usually watched by young idlers who have had far too much to drink and smoke. Treated with undue solemnity, the film loses some of its gleefully irresponsible attraction and much of its point. I will want to make some fairly large and high-toned claims for it, but I will try never to lose sight of the fact that it is a shaggy, smelly, disreputable beast, and that it always, unfailingly, makes me laugh like a loon. So: à nos moutons. Pass the lighter fluid.

2 The Arena of the Unwell

At first, the sound is more important than the image. A saxophone solo, improvising weightlessly around the tune of Procol Harum’s 1967 hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. (We will meet haughty speakers of Latin later in the film; these pedants would no doubt hasten to point out that ‘Procol’ should be procul: ‘far’, or ‘far from’.) Drained of its nonsense lyrics about light fandangoes and vestal virgins, the pop melody is ennobled. ‘So sweet … so sour … this is beautiful’, as Robinson’s original script rightly notes. The soloist is King Curtis, from the album Live from Fillmore West. You can hear the concert audience, and ripples of applause – an unfamiliar sound to the chronically underemployed actors we are about to encounter. King Curtis was murdered later that same evening, after being attacked in the Fillmore’s car park. Though he did not know it, he was performing his own requiem. Bruce Robinson had heard the solo long before Withnail became a saleable project, and tagged it at once for use as the opening theme. More than that, it is the statement of the film’s dominant emotional key, the doorway into its soul: ‘It’s what the film should be.’ Our comedy begins, as it will end, in elegiac mode.

Comedies, in conventional wisdom, should be brightly lit, tragedies glimpsed through a lens darkly. If so, then this is going to be one of the most sombre works in cinema history, because the image is not so much under-lit as grubby, as if the celluloid had been steeped in tea and nicotine. Through it, we can make out an uncommon mixture of grandeur and decay – rooms like a high-class antique shop² which has been taken over by an army of hippie squatters.

Immersed in this shabby splendour is a young man of striking, rather feminine good looks. Dressed in a sweater, and wearing National Health glasses of the kind made fashionable by John Lennon, he sits, he smokes, he trembles. (Is he listening to King Curtis on an LP, or is the music, as they say in film courses, non-diegetic? Probably the latter: Withnail and I, who lack most modern appliances, are unlikely to run to a record player.) He is the ‘I’ of the film’s title, and ‘I’ remains nameless throughout the film, just as Withnail will subsist without a Christian name, but the script calls him Marwood. Legend has it that he possesses a given name: Peter.

It is clear, even to the innocent eye, that Marwood is none too happy; to the rest of us, we worldly souls who have knocked about a bit in Withnailian society, it soon becomes obvious that Marwood is coming down, though from what intoxicant is not (yet) specified. But consider the symptoms: sleeplessness, agitation, mild to intense paranoia … The clever money would be on amphetamines, and a few scenes later Marwood confirms this diagnosis in a bathtub soliloquy:

Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change. You lose. You gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills … But some time or another you gotta get out. Because it’s crashing. And all at once those frozen hours melt through the nervous system and seep out the pores.

Withnail & I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Withnail & Me
• 1 A Terrible Cult?
• 2 The Arena of the Unwell
• 3 A Kingdom of Rains
• 4 The Last Island of Beauty
• 5 The Company of Wolves
• Notes
• Credits
• eCopyright