Robert J. Maxwell
There's something wrong with me because whenever I hear a film referred to as a "cult movie" I avoid it. "Withnail and I" was called a cult movie but it's an exception because it's actually pretty good. You have never heard insults and curses with so much elegance and filigree. They could tear a hole in the space/time continuum.Richard Grant and Paul McGann are two young aspiring artists (of one sort or another, maybe acting and writing) living in a London flat that's so sloppy, so ill kept, so dishabillé, so DESECRATED, that it looks almost like my humble abandoned railway car. Both are neurotics in the same way that both are artists. Grant is Withnail, tall and skinny, and McGann is the "I" in "Withnail and I." The former is given to an excess of alcohol from time to time, while the latter has anxiety attacks on a regular basis. "LOOK -- my THUMBS are going weird!" They're visited by a doper friend who has a cool exterior, what can be seen of it beneath the fright wig, and a speech impediment that renders even his slowest, most ominous threats harmless as a child's. "If I ever 'medicined' you, you'd think a bwain tumor was a birthday pwesent." Withnail and I shake down Withnail's gay and wealthy uncle (Richard Griffiths) for the key to Griffith's weekend country house, which hasn't been used in years and turns out to be in ramshackle shape. Griffiths appears later in the film when he visits the two lads at the house and puts moves on McGann, scaring McGann to death, but Griffiths' best lines show up during his introduction. He says to his nephew, "Would you pour us a sherry, dear boy?" and then leaves the room for a moment, during which Grant hastily grabs the bottle and wordlessly chugalugs a couple of glasses worth. They begin discussing gardening. Griffiths love cauliflowers. "There's poetry in the cauliflower. Roses are the prostitutes of plants, just sitting there waiting to be pollinated by bees. But vegetables in general are noble. There's nothing like a firm young carrot." (Paraphrasing there.) The story weakens a bit at the country estate, a filthy place, and the weakest segment is Griffiths' visit that introduces a touch of pathos.Finally, the duo return to their London flat to find it occupied by the doper and his colossal black friend. Some of the humor is kind of subtle so I'll point out an instance here. Throughout the movie, the two white guys have a tendency to Jimmi Hendrix and his blackish hard-rock electric guitar. When they get home from the country. Withnail and I find the bathtub occupied by the strange black guy with the Afro and he's listening to The Beatles, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." It's funny, see. The white guys listening to black rock and the black guy listening to The Beatles "White Album"? No? Am I committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy? At the end, sadly, Withnail and I split up, for reasons not made too clear. And Withnail, the actor, addresses a zoo with wolves and comes out with some lines from Hamlet, which I am about to quote: "Recently, though I don't know why, I've lost all sense of fun, stopped exercising-the whole world feels sterile and empty. This beautiful canopy we call the sky-this majestic roof decorated with golden sunlight-why, it's nothing more to me than disease-filled air. What a perfect invention a human is, how noble in his capacity to reason, how unlimited in thinking, how admirable in his shape and movement, how angelic in action, how godlike in understanding! There's nothing more beautiful. Men don't interest me. No-women neither, but you're smiling, so you must think they do. We surpass all other animals. And yet to me, what are we but dust? " But Withnail's reshaped the lines so that the quotation ends with the dismal "dust." Then he tromps off through the torrent of rain. It would have been better, more filled with irony, if he'd just ended the quote with "There's nothing more beautiful." I mean, after all, why paint the lily?
JKlein9823
In my opinion, this is a pointless movie. I just don't get it. Am I missing something? I see other IMDb users are giving it favorable reviews.I watched this on DVD at a weekly "movie night" gathering. Not one viewer laughed throughout this entire alleged comedy. Being an American and unaccustomed to English accents, we had so much difficulty understanding the dialog, we had to turn on the closed captioning. Even that did not help. Could someone please explain the appeal of this film? I am baffled.
siderite
It's hard to explain this film, as it is mostly a very weak story with a lot of great acting in it. Richard Grant makes it all worthwhile, even if this is his first role in a film. Ironically, the film is about unemployed actors looking for work. Well, it's not about them looking, it's more about them getting high and drunk and living from one day to the next looking for the next source of booze.The emotions of these impaired people are made extremely clear by the subtle but smart dialogue and the great acting of all involved. It reminded me of Trainspotting a bit, since the story is basically about drug and/or alcohol addled friends and the wonderful time one can have in this company, but also the trap that it lays for someone trying to live in the modern society. Meet the last thespian barbarians, living their lives as they see fit, while they still can, before the future catches up with them.On one side the film kind of bored me, as the scenes were slow and uneventful, on the other it fascinated me to see the great acting and to "get" the characters. It is also a subtle satire on the British society, starting with people waking up to read all those ridiculous news about crimes and corruption, and ending with a grandstanding description of "we live in a kingdom of rains where royalty comes in gangs", while the middle of the film is just people trying to survive without being part of that world.Worth a watch, definitely a good movie, just make sure you are in the mood for a slow dialogue driven film.
gsygsy
10 out of 10? Really? Yes. This beautifully written, superbly performed movie deserves nothing less.Maybe to get the very best out of WITHNAIL AND I, some knowledge of the English obsession with class would be helpful. And maybe too some sense of what the 1960s represented for the principal characters. But even without all that, its depiction of mutual dependency growing into estrangement is so tenderly done that the film transcends any specific time and place. It's the splitting up of a double act taking place before our very eyes.Funny and sad. Just like life.Perfect.Full marks.
