There is an apocryphal story about a woman leaving a performance of Hamlet and complaining that it was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Bruce Robinson’s 1987 movie Withnail & I can also feel like a caravan of famous lines: ‘I’ve only had a few ales’; ‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake’; ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity!’ In the 1990s, when the men’s magazine Loaded canonized the film in its launch issue and Chris Evans paid around $8,000 for Withnail’s tweed coat, its swift elevation from box office failure to cult set text came at the price of reducing it to a boozy lark. A film about ruinous alcoholism thus inspired a student drinking game, although most players stopped short of Withnail’s last resort tipple, lighter fluid.
As Martin Keady observes in two fine essays in Toby Benjamin’s book, the film’s reputation has matured because its fans have. You need some miles on the clock to fully appreciate a film about the end of one’s twenties at the end of the 1960s, and a friendship in winter. Consider the title of the play whose life-changing role finally separates Marwood (Paul McGann) from Withnail (Richard E. Grant): Journey’s End. ‘It’s decided before we meet them,’ McGann tells Benjamin. ‘This is over and Withnail knows it’s over.’ It’s a breakup movie, a last dance, an elegy wrapped in a comedy.
