Withnail and I movie review & film summary (1987)

The dialogue is famous and quoted; in the U.K., certain lines are widely recognized. "I can't get my boots on when they're hot," "Those are the kind of windows faces look in at," "Warm up? We may as well sit round this cigarette," "My thumbs have gone weird!" and Danny the drug dealer's "Hairs 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."

Danny (Ralph Brown) has dialogue that speaks to the bottom line of the movie: "We are 91 days away from the end of the 1960s, the greatest decade in human history." The film is a time capsule, not least because booze is more central than drugs, although Danny's theory of the politics of uppers and downers is prophetic. Withnail and Marwood share the delusion that release and elation can be found in a bottle. If you asked them if it made them happy to drink, they would probably claim that it did, and that's why they do it.

Well, maybe not Withnail. For reasons remaining obscure and certainly never mentioned by him, he seems to be courting suicide. He pours bottles down his throat, sucks on cigarettes, alienates the world, always looks enraged. At the end of the film, he has a famous scene when he stands in the rain beside a fence and performs the Hamlet soliloquy including, "What a piece of work is a man!" He is one of the rare characters in modern films who can quote it with accuracy about himself.

That scene reflects on a quality in the film: Withnail, Marwood and Monty for that matter, are well educated, steeped in literature and drama, and so their speech is not sodden but shows intelligence and wit even in the worst of times. (Marwood, after being threatened by a man in a pub: "I don't consciously offend big men like this. And this one has a decided imbalance of hormone in him. Get any more masculine than that and you'd have to live up a tree.")

Why does the film, which I have made sound so depressing, remain so popular after more than 20 years? It achieves a kind of transcendence in its gloom. It is uncompromisingly, sincerely, itself. It is not a lesson or a lecture, it is funny but in a consistent way that it earns, and it is unforgettably acted. Bruce Robinson saw such times, survived them and remembers them not with bitterness but fidelity. In Withnail, he creates one of the iconic figures in modern films. Most of us may have known someone like Withnail. It is likely that Withnail never knew someone like us. His mind was elsewhere.