We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful: “Withnail & I”
It Came From The Wayback Machine Vol. 11 (Orig. published in FilmBar, 2017)
“I’m 30 in a month and I’ve got a sole flapping off my shoe.”
It’s 1969 and two unemployed actors in Camden Town are struggling to stay afloat. While the Summer of Love zeitgeist is raging on in other parts of the country, Marwood (Paul McGann) and Withnail (Richard E. Grant) spend their days picking up unemployment, buying speed from their spacey drug dealer (Ralph Brown), getting tanked at the local pub, and trying not to freeze to death in their dump of a rental (a hovel so grotesque that both roomies are pretty sure there’s something alive underneath the mound of dirty dishes in the sink). The dream of the Sixties, the daisy age of Swingin’ London, couldn’t be further away.
Released in 1987, Withnail & I is a blackly comic masterpiece. Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, the film shines with a script so sharp it could cut through diamonds. It’s also anchored by the once-in-a-lifetime performance of Grant, whose Withnail is a hilarious tragic figure. With his slicked-back hair, shabby dandy clothes, vampiric pallor, and Byronic air, he’s simultaneously the best and worst dinner guest imaginable: the kind of person who could entertain you for hours with scintillating conversation, and who’d then run off with…
