REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

By: Mark Kingwell
June 21, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

WITHNAIL AND I | BRUCE ROBINSON | 1987

A scene of squalor, but with the most elegant soundtrack you can imagine. King Curtis’s live version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale” slides us around the apartment’s disarray, the organ – Hammond B3? — oozing its way from the piercing, aching, trilling, lovely lovely sax. Oh boy. This song is so much better without the goofy Procol Harum vocals. A lone figure smokes intently.

This is all the serenity we’ll get. The scenario develops, punctuated by disturbing tabloid headlines: sex-change surgery, steroids, naughty au pair. “My thumbs have gone weird!” the distraught smoker yells to his raving drunken roommate. They are out of wine.

Two out-of-work actors, subsisting on scraps, drinking anything at all, going borderline insane in the freezing-cold flat in a desolate London precinct, Camden Town, 1969. They are just flush enough to score drugs and quaff cheap cider pints and gin chasers at the scary local pub. Their drug dealer, played with memorable weirdness by Ralph Brown, is far too liberal.

A plan! Withnail, all staring eyes and a livid haircut (Richard E. Grant), has a wealthy uncle, Monty. Said Monty — styled with hefty camp by Richard Griffiths — is persuaded to lend the boys his cottage in the Lake District so they can flee the pressures of the Big Smoke. The “I” of the title, Marwood in the script, is a handsome waif in Paul McGann’s portrayal, anarchic enough to fall in with Withnail’s inebriated schemes and fuck-you-stupid-world nihilism but still hoping for the casting break that in fact arrives at story’s end. Withnail’s long pinch-back Edwardian overcoat, meanwhile, appears in a supporting role, reminiscent of the flowing cloak of Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince and, like Cary Grant’s grey suit in North By Northwest, a bespoke suit of armour.

Thus a buddy flick of sorts, tracking the intersecting vectors of two friends moving in opposite directions. It is also a country-house send-up, with the trials of life among surly bumpkins played for post-Waughian laughs. (Grant’s turn as a dotty patriarch in 2023’s Saltburn is the conjoining term here: he’s Withnail aged, with an inheritance.) “We’ve gone on vacation by mistake!” Withnail shouts wildly at one point, articulating a feeling surely widely shared. Other signature lines are part of the film’s cult legacy, from “Get in the back of the van!” to, of course, “Monty, you terrible cunt!”

There is a Withnail and I drinking game, naturally, but if you were to try and match the boys drink for drink it would probably end up in even more chaos than their disruption of a sedate village tea salon and terrifying drunk driving. Some aspects of the story have dated: Monty’s louche predatory advances on Marwood, allegedly based on director Robinson’s experiences with a lecherous Franco Zeffirelli, are sketched on comic lines that may strike 2020s audiences as decidedly unfunny.

For all the chortles and booze, it’s a moving tale. Withnail’s dispirited recital of a soliloquy from Hamlet after Marwood’s departure for sober life and work is the lament of every party-boy who’s lost his wingman. But it is also the eternal cry of the lonely. What a piece of work is man. Chin chin.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

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