Word: withnail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...head. It has eyes, nose and a foul, funnily flapping mouth -- Bagley's id made manifest and shouting down his superego like some corporate raider ragging management at a stockholders meeting. Goodbye, Ealing Studios. Hello, Kafka. And for a while, pretty good Kafka. As he showed in Withnail and I, director Bruce Robinson has a truly weird sensibility, and Grant is his kind of guy, an actor morosely and ferociously resistant to normalcy and good cheer. In a story in which his wife (a spiritless Rachel Ward), his boss and medical science tell him all he needs to be cured...
...intended as a microcosmic portrait of contemporary English life. So call it, perhaps, a fable on the sneak. And call it something else too: yet another carefully handmade ornament of the new British cinema, which includes such small recent marvels as My Beautiful Laundrette; Rita, Sue and Bob Too; Withnail and I and Wish You Were Here...
Ambitious Withnail sees them as portents. If he cannot realize the simple dream of a healthful week in the country, what chance does he have of becoming the next Olivier? "And I" is more sanguine and delighted to get a job in provincial rep. Thus he begins that patient paddle up life's stream, in the course of which he will come to accept this experience for what it was -- a & youthful funk, to be recouped through laughter, not a great existential turning to be brooded...
Even the most mild mannered of these new movies, Withnail and I, is a shock to our expectations. American literati are, after all, conditioned to share the Lake poets' faith in the restorative powers of the pastoral: the thatch tight on the cottage roof, the peat glowing on the grate, the cattle posing for a painting by Constable. The vision is especially poignant if you are as deeply down as was the "and I" of the title (played by Paul McGann) and as angrily out as his roommate Withnail (Richard E. Grant) when they were aspiring actors in London...
...know their agents can give them just as short shrift by long distance. Perhaps a country visit will rescue their faith in the universe's orderliness. Well, they have reckoned without the rain, mud and chill. Or the bull in a neighbor's field. Or the queenly ardor of Withnail's Uncle Monty (a sweetly mad Richard Griffiths), who turns up to pursue his hopeless passion for "and I." Somehow, Wordsworth failed to mention these inconveniences...