Bruce Robinson (1987)

I’d never seen it before.  I was prejudiced against it, not because it launched the screen career of one of my least favourite actors but I think because of the ‘classic British cult comedy’ tag.   Set in Camden Town and Penrith at the fag end of the 1960s, Withnail and I is about two out-of-work actors.  They embody a shift from one actor stereotype to another, even though you think of that shift occurring well before the late sixties.   Withnail (Richard E Grant) is a colourfully foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, bone idle egotist with an essential and supposedly redeeming patrician élan.  The unnamed I (Paul McGann) is tousle-haired, also hard-drinking, relatively prepared to work, more plebeian and less charismatic.   The centre of the film is the pair’s weekend away in the cottage of Withnail’s Uncle Monty in the Northumberland countryside, where they’re joined for part of the time by Monty himself.  When they return to London, the McGann character has landed a lead part, gets his hair cut and leaves their flat – now filled with Withnail’s pothead friend Danny and a mysterious chanting companion – for the real world.  The picture ends with Withnail declaiming one of Hamlet’s speeches in pouring rain just outside Regent’s Park zoo, to unresponsive wolves.

It’s a British film all right.  The early scenes in the flat are cramped and ugly without that being made visually interesting.  The lighting of the Northumberland landscape and some of the interiors there is lovely without that meaning anything in terms of what else is happening on screen. There are outbursts of physical comedy to keep things moving and gobbets of ‘literary’ first person voice-over which doesn’t, however, become a coherent narrative style.  The writing of the opening and closing sequences in the flat between Withnail and I is stagy.  There are some good lines in between but Withnail and I is funny mostly at the level of ‘anarchic’ sitcom (some of Withnail’s tirades bring to mind Vivian’s rants in The Young Ones which the BBC had screened several years earlier).   The genuinely pleasing visual gags – such as the surreally clueless preparation of a chicken dinner – are rare.

The story and the people in it have the texture – or lack of texture – of autobiographical material that Bruce Robinson hasn’t fully worked out.  The namelessness of I is indicative of this: Robinson hasn’t really bothered to write a character and Paul McGann certainly can’t find one – he gives an overeager, vague performance.  Richard E Grant, in contrast, is certainly distinctive – a lordly cadaver who keeps lurching into limp infantilism (though his emotional hollowness makes him dreary when, at the end, he tries to be genuinely touching).  Richard Griffiths’s arrival on the scene as Uncle Monty is very welcome.  He’s a proper character actor, fusing theatrical flair and empathy with the person he’s playing.  Griffiths is so much stronger than anyone else that Uncle Monty’s sustained attempts and failure to get I into bed dominate the proceedings almost too much.   Monty is greedily predatory and desperately needy; Griffiths’s bulk gives both aspects an extra insistence.   Ralph Brown, whose voice is a cross between Harold Steptoe and the speaking clock, is terrible as Danny.  Every time he opens his mouth, he kills the rhythm of the conversation – in the wrong way.  Michael Elphick has a good bit as a malign Northumberland poacher.

6 March 2009