Withnail and I

Richard E. Grant, is an actor who has been around for over thirty years but is finally having his moment in the sun with an Oscar nomination or Can You Ever Forgive Me? His film debut was in 1987, in Withnail and I, a tawdry comedy that has reached cult status. I hadn't seen it since it opened (if I recall correctly, I saw it at the Carnegie Cinema).

I looked at it again the other night and it's still very funny, full of wicked bon mots, though there is one theme running through it that doesn't play very well today. I'll get to that in a bit.

Grant and Paul McGann play a couple of down-on-their-luck actors sharing a flat in Camden Town. It is 1969. Their place is one of squalor, where they approach the overladen sink carefully, afraid something is living in it. Both drink heavily, Grant mostly: " I must have some booze. I demand to have some booze!" is one of his exclamations. Mostly they sleep or crawl outside to a pub. As an American, I wonder how they get their money, but I suppose they are on the dole, though they do talk about trying to get money from their fathers.

They have an occasional visitor, Danny, who is a drug dealer but speaks like an Oxford don (the actor playing him is Ralph Brown, who is hysterical). Danny says things like: "I don't advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair 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."

McGann (who is the "I" in the film--his name is never mentioned) decides they should hit up Grant's uncle for use of his country house. Uncle Monty is played with a fabulous flair by Richard Griffiths, who is a sophisticated homosexual and says things like: "I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees. There is, you'll agree, a certain 'je ne sais quoi' oh so very special about a firm, young carrot."

Grant and McGann set out for the house, which they find has no fuel, no food, and no electricity. Like fish out of water, the two city boys struggle to catch game (Grant shoots at fish with a shotgun) or buy eel from a poacher, who threatens them and scares the wits out of them. When they hear noises at night, they assume it's him, come to kill them, but it's only Monty (Grant yells at him, "Monty, you terrible cunt!").

While the haplessness of these two is very funny, I didn't find the next part funny. This is a film made in 1987 and set about twenty years earlier, but the whole notion of homosexual panic--McGann realizes that Monty wants him, and Grant had told his uncle that McGann was gay--is just not funny anymore. Griffiths tries to force himself on McGann, and now it seems outdated and pathetic. If they remade the picture it might have been funnier to have Uncle Monty be Aunt Somebody, a cougar after McGann. It would have been less insulting.

That's the basic story--neither character, especially Withnail, learns anything. The writer and director Bruce Robinson (who I just realized played Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet--how could I not have known that) based Withnail on a person he knew who constantly said he could be great at something if he only did it, but he did nothing but drink. Grant, with a kind of wraith-like beauty, is a raging id (interestingly neither of the boys ever mention women) who says what's on his mind, come hell or high water. He is the kind of  character you would never want to be, but you would love to hang out with.

McGann's part is far less interesting--he has to be the blander guy who reflects everything Withnail does. Griffiths, while employing gay stereotypes, is still very good as the rotund Monty, his hair parted in the middle like some giant baby.

I have only seen the film twice; I'm a piker. There are legions of fans who have seen it dozens of times and know all the lines by heart. I don't think it's that good, but it is a lot of fun.