Cult British Classic on Booze (Withnail And I (DVD))

Member Name: mcader

Product:	Withnail And I (DVD)
Date:	12/02/09 (31 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: manic, comical, OTT approach to living for awhile...

Disadvantages: v. Studenty and British Jim Carrey

Two struggling actors decide to visit the country.....

This small British film has become a huge student cult, largely due to the dialogue, continuously and gloriously peppered with classic quotations and comic moments that pour forth in confrontations between characters and with society. It has an excellent script where manic, irresponsible and irrational behaviour prevail in copious quantities. This film epitomizes, celebrates and revels in that frenzied condition of carefree intoxication and wild spontaneous living, familiar to all who have lived as students or in the early desperate stages of a career.

Set at the end of the sixties we are swiftly presented with an atmosphere of disorientated and abundant freedom, in the hands of two intelligent people with only vague ideas or ambitions. From here ensues the hysterical humour found among friends who face the realities of the world, where everything can be seen as farcical and then parodied or framed as such, especially when resolutely inebriated. This is also where the divide is drawn between those who love the film and associate with such behaviour and those who dislike or fail to appreciate it, perhaps because their more responsible character-traits prevent them from relating to this aspect. The characters are determined to postpone the onset of any real thought or sensible deliberation which appears to inflict the stoney edges of acceptable living.

Withnail's uncle Monty is a homosexual and owns the cottage in the country. He is a pompous and indulged excuse for supreme farce and classic innuendo. The man in the pub and the farmer are other stereotpyical representatives of the ludicrous face-offs with inbred or 'respectable' characters found in society. They are people clearly unaffected by the Jimi Hendrix revolution of attitudes and our liberated anti-duo step briskly over their preciousness, prejudices and entrenched and shallow airs and graces. The writer and director could have taken this too far, with bitter socialist messages and anger, but instead has kept it light-hearted, comical and unconcerned. The main characters are too flawed in themselves anyhow, such that everyone who appears seems flawed, even the overly neurotic Marwood.

There are deeper themes beneath the strong characterization and abundantly mad-cap dialogue. For this is in fact a tragi-comedy that distills for many people, a passage or stage in life where potentially powerful, intelligent or gifted people are united in crazy friendship and unattached abandon, incited perhaps by very real and constant worry about the near future. This worry or threat hangs over their time together (punctuated by phone calls to agents) yet its postponement is liberating - the anti-establishment comraderie leads us to inventive adventure and endurance, relishing the farcical nature of the world because of their detachment and solidarity.

But the threat succeeds. It is the end of an era championing the outraged, questioning behaviour of those such as Withnail and responsibility must intervene and 'rain on the parade' even. Towards the end, one of the characters breaks free and enters maturity - he says farewell to the champion of this lifestyle that cannot last or be endorsed. The character Marwood (the 'I' of the title) must be as Henry V becoming King, leaving the good, poor people he loves behind to continue their questioning, powerless, outcast existence.

It is a farewell to youth and fresh perspective, the part of us that dies in the move of becoming truly part of the system. At least, this is one interpretation as the two characters part ways - one temporarily successful, the other perhaps yet to be.

The outlooks of the characters are different but are for a great time in union. Marwood we realise to be more sensible and dedicated, as he ultimately seizes a break that will mean deserting one fun lifestyle for the necessary security in another. Withnail is a jack of all trades but master of none - an intelligent but flawed loose cannon doomed to remain in the irresponsible wilderness, an embodiment of unfulfilled talent - a tragic aspect highlighted with his poignant and concluding quotation from Hamlet.

It is superbly self-indulgent and symbolic, proving that a film need not have a clever plot but may revel in the whims of its characters. It is hysterical, hilarious and outraged yet tragic and poignant - the confusion and struggling of knowing how to receive or proceed in the world, the sheer disbelief of its accepted aspects (the absurd stories in the newspaper that Withnail reads out loud), the wonder and importance of friendships which ultimately drift apart, and the reductionist reminder that all we do is absurd as poor players strutting and fretting our hours upon the stage.

Withnail walks away at the end amid the rain. A jaded funfair music plays. This film is a classic segment and tribute to a lifestyle made possible by its presence on the edge of many things - and here we are briefly able to revisit it.

Summary: A sad side to the film too!