Bruce Robinson’s comedy makes failure and heavy drinking painfully funny, with Richard E. Grant’s fury held in check by Paul McGann’s watchfulness. The slight story occasionally drifts, but the performances make the company worth keeping.
Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I is a comedy about two struggling actors who have enough energy to complain and scarcely any left to change their circumstances. It is an excellent comedy, and its sadness comes from recognising how long people can carry on like this. The London setting at the end of the 1960s matters because these men seem to have missed whatever freedom the decade was supposed to offer. Robinson gives them hangovers, uncertain prospects and language far grander than their situation deserves.
Richard E. Grant plays Withnail’s anger with such precision that even self-pity acquires a kind of authority. He can make a complaint sound rehearsed, as though the correct emphasis might oblige somebody to put things right. We laughed at the sheer care he takes over being aggrieved; the effort is so much greater than the grievance can justify. There is also something wearing about that effort, and Grant lets us feel what prolonged company with this man would cost.
Paul McGann is essential to making that company bearable. As Withnail’s companion, he has less showy material, but gives the exchanges the alertness of someone listening for trouble. We found his anxiety more affecting than we expected, because his responses make clear how little room Withnail leaves for anyone else’s concerns. Robinson’s dialogue gives the pair different ways of being lost, and the actors keep those differences visible. Without McGann, the film would be a much more exhausting evening.
Peter Hannan’s cinematography and Michael Pickwoad’s production design make the squalor look uncomfortable enough to discourage imitation. The surroundings help explain the bad temper without excusing it. Robinson allows long takes in which we have time to notice the other actor, not simply the one with the better line. Editor Alan Strachan preserves that space, which is a substantial part of the comedy: a response need not arrive immediately to be funny. Sometimes we are waiting for McGann to have had enough.
David Dundas and Rick Wentworth’s music keeps the melancholy present without making every disappointment an occasion for sympathy. That restraint matters in a film where the dialogue already demands so much attention. Richard Griffiths, as Monty, brings a different comic confidence, with eccentricity played as something entirely reasonable to the person displaying it. Robinson gives him room to register alongside Grant, and Griffiths makes good use of it. The acting has enough variety to prevent the drinking and discontent from becoming a single prolonged complaint.
There are stretches when the film seems content to let another beautifully phrased complaint stand in for movement. At 108 minutes, it occasionally feels longer than this slight story requires, even with Strachan’s patient handling of the performances. The dialogue is so accomplished that Robinson sometimes appears reluctant to leave it behind. A less capable cast would make these stretches harder to forgive. Anyone who wants the plot to keep changing the characters’ circumstances will notice them sooner.
Drinking comedies often invite us to envy their characters’ lack of responsibility. Robinson is more interested in how repeated failure keeps people dependent on one another, and the performances make that dependence uncomfortable. Grant’s fury and McGann’s watchfulness give the friendship a strain that the jokes cannot quite relieve. Watch it with someone who can enjoy an elaborately expressed grievance without needing to join in.
