Bruce Robinson directs Richard E Grant, Paul McGann and Richard Griffiths in this cult British comedy where two out-of-work actors escape the poverty and haze of bedsit London in the Sixties and go “on holiday by mistake”.

Withnail & I is a unique cinematic experience. There’s been comedy about misery before. Tragedy plus time and all that. The key to a good sitcom is characters trapped together by the set. British comedy anyway. Yet the destitution, cowardliness and grimy irresponsibility of Bruce Robinson’s recollections of his struggling actor days are a whole other level. You can taste the cold wobble of a greasy spoon egg, feel the rotten cat hair over Monty’s furniture, smell the stink of unemptied ashtrays in the pub. There’s nothing nostalgic about the shit end of the Swingin’ Sixties. No one is having free love here, or is easily upwardly mobile. This is the underbelly of London at its apex, where the shit rolls downhill. A countryside lost in the past, scary from its conservatism. A London of violence and rainy disarray. There’s no Go-Go girls dancing around Carnaby, just rejection. Leaning into a tattered, unkempt desolation of alcohol and terror that will only pull your further down the “matter” filled plug hole. And even then, as you see this depressing counter to counterculture, there’s the fact that as a child when Withnail & I came out this was a film that I have inherited from a previous generation. They quote it, they celebrate its grubby excess. The students of the Eighties. It throbbed through the pages of film magazines and retrospectives as THE cult item that my younger lot just had to get on board with. It holds up better then and now than Spinal Tap or The Comic Strip did or does. Withnail & I actually is funny but terrifying and sad. Boorish but heartfelt, cowardly but enticing. The paranoia imbued into every interaction is palpable. A world where everyone wants to fight, bugger or subjugate you. Grant’s big glorious luvvy blowhard destitute is still amazing to behold, McGann’s reactive cypher quakes in his long shadow. Yet the older I grow, it proves Griffiths’ Uncle Monty who steals the show for me. Predatory, a chess master of getting his bum hole, as he corners McGann’s I with unwavering practice one can’t help sorry and repulsed by the generation that came before even these lost souls. How much youth and talent is left to the wayside of unfulfilled dreams, loneliness and addiction? Why must one generation feed on the weakness of another with such callous entitlement? At least Withnail & I had each other, until that closing moment where they savagely don’t.

8

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