This review was updated on September 21, 2024
Blending humour and sadness is among the trickiest balancing acts in cinema, but for a brief moment in 1987, writer-director Bruce Robinson made it look easy. Drawing on his own experiences as a struggling actor in the late 1960s – and taking inspiration from real-life figures including the great Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, whose alleged pursuit of the young Robinson fed into the character of the predatory Uncle Monty – Robinson first envisioned the material as a novel, before being persuaded to transform it into a screenplay.
Produced by Handmade Films – whose chief financier, George Harrison, personally signed off on the project, and even allowed his song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ to be used in the film – Withnail and I was shot on location in London and the Lake District (Monty’s cottage still stands, though sadly the Mother Black Cap pub was demolished in 2011), with a largely unknown cast and an inexperienced director.
Nevertheless, it was a classic from the first: reviews at the time recognised the quality of its direction and performances – playing the louche, devious, ultimately tragic Withnail made Richard E Grant an overnight star – while huge chunks of the script instantly entered the cultural lexicon, particularly those lines uttered by Ralph Brown’s antenna-haired, permanently wasted Danny the Dealer: you could barely move for Camberwell Carrots in the early ’90s.
The louche, devious, ultimately tragic Withnail made Richard E Grant a star
But as the years pass, it’s Robinson’s mastery of tone that makes Withnail endure, that rich, sweet sadness that permeates every frame, as the ’60s draw to a close and the dream begins to fade, as both Uncle Monty and Withnail struggle desperately to escape the shadow of loneliness and failure, and the unnamed ‘I’ passes his audition and abandons them both to their fate. It wasn’t a trick that Robinson could repeat – but then again, neither could almost anyone else.
What to watch next:
Gregory’s Girl (1983); Local Hero (1983); The Holdovers (2023)