Withnail and I (4K remaster)

4K REMASTER REVIEW! Director/writer Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I is a 1987 classic British black comedy following two unemployed actors, Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and “I” (Paul McGann), who share a flat in the Camden Town part of London in 1969. After an unsettling visit from their drug-dealing associate Danny (Ralph Brown), a “purveyor of rare herbs and prescribed chemicals,” they are desperate for booze and a change of scenery. 

Deciding they need a holiday out of the city, they schmooze Withnail’s rich, flamboyant Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) into allowing them to stay at his country cottage in Penrith in the Lake District.  Being city folk through and through, the two are woefully unprepared to meet even the minimum requirements of pastoral life in the farmland around the small, neglected house called Crow Crag. The next day, Uncle Monty arrives unexpectedly with supplies, including plentiful wine, but he has a nefarious purpose for horning in on their holiday, and a miserable situation is made even hilariously worse. 

Richard E. Grant as Withnail menaces Paul McGann’s character with a comb in a chaotic moment from Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I (1987)

“… a classic tale of two unemployed actors, who share a flat in Camden Town in 1969…”

For a particular generation of Europeans, and a growing number of others, Withnail and I is a crucial, classic watershed film that defined the end of an era. Robinson based the characters and the story on his own life. Withnail came from a wild roommate named Vivian MacKerrell. He shared a flat with him in Camden Town. Episodes from his own life and the crushing cultural disappointments at the end of the 1960s set the scene. That resonated hard when it released, as the 1980s also came crashing down with a similar disillusionment. 

By September 1969, the party is over for Withnail and company, and their shattered dreams of acting bring a time of reckoning. The gut-punch impact and staying power of the film derive from the raw authenticity of the script, blended with the superb performances of Grant, McGann, Brown, and Griffiths. The drastically underrated Richard E. Grant, of course, tops the bill with his exaggerated, hysterical, narcissistic delivery of Withnail. He plays a very similar character in Marielle Heller’s 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? In both cases, his performance is transcendent.