I have seen “Withnail and I” about eight times and I consider it not only the funniest movie ever made but also the most meaningful and interesting. What follows is a brief description of the movie and the key reasons for why it struck me from the very start as a masterpiece. The movie tells the story of two failing actors, living in an eccentric state of poverty in a run-down, decrepit but highly aesthetic apartment in Camden in 1969. The apartment is dark, cluttered with old furniture, strewn with cigarette butts and empty wine bottles and a kitchen so neglected that the grime from the washing up is so entrenched that they dare not attack it. This was a London characterised not by the glitz, Michelin star restaurants and exuberant property prices of today but by the sex, drugs and rock n’roll of “the greatest decade in the history of mankind”. This is very much a movie about the end of an era where the main characters realise that they have reached the end of the past part of their lives and as a result find themselves emotionally lost, having been disenfranchised from the rapidly changing world around them.

The movie provides us with a fascinating array of highly unique and unforgettable characters who represent misfits and mavericks who are excluded from the still relatively conservative and traditional Britain which they mock and satirise. Withnail though constantly sulking about his poverty, cowardly and even selfish he always manages to be incredibly witty and beautifully cynical about the absurdity of the world around him. He drinks incredible quantities of alchahol to stay warm and deal with things and even resorts to drinking anti- freeze in a moment of desperation , always wears some knackered tweed or trench coat, constantly smokes and is incompetent in the way that droll and intellectual Eton-educated men have to be . Uncle Monty, Withnail’s uncle, is a large man who loves vegetables but is also deeply sad, having lived a life of shame, failure and secrecy by both failing to fulfil his dream of playing Hamlet and never being able to come to terms with his repressed homosexuality. He joins the characters on a holiday in the Lake District where he has an old farmhouse which is terrifying beautiful, cold and inconvenient where he spends the time trying to seduce the narrator and reminiscing about his youth. Alongside these magnificent creations we meet a raging and violent drunk homophobe, a big blazed black man, a farmer with a leg wrapped in polythene, a xenophobic crone, a colonial dipsomaniac, a randy bull, a poacher and a manic cockney drug dealer.

Though the main characters live in a state of unemployed poverty and have to resort to rubbing their bodies in fat to stay warm there is something strange and inexplicably glamorous and attractive about their lives. Probably because it’s so different from anything that I, being firmly middle class, could imagine and because everything about the characters is interesting and breaks away from the conforming mould imposed on all of us. Therefore for me at least they are the cinematic bastions of a counter-culturist way of life and an adamant refusal to behave and look in the way that society expects you to.

However, the movies ending is the probably the saddest and most heart-breaking moment in the history of cinema, and really encapsulates the defining thematic principle of the movie itself. In short, at the end of all the hilarity of the preceding scenes we are faced with Withnail and the narrator about to separate, for the two friends who have so long shared their lives are about to  go their separate ways, one towards professional success and the other to remain miserable, poor and this time alone. The tear inducing pathos of this ending scene culminates in these words from Hamlet, eloquently and emotionally recited by an emotionally shattered, drunk and drenched Withnail overlooking an enclosure of wolves who has just lost his best friend and companion:

“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promotory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this mighty o'rehanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire; why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, how like an angel in aprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dusk. Man delights not me, no, nor women neither”- Hamlet, ACT 2, SCENE 2

Harry Drake - Published Friday 3rd April 2015