A Film Canon

A charming reconsideration of the 60s from the perspective of the 80s, Withnail & I follows two unemployed actors - Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and I (Paul McGann) - who, feeling the burden of being "ninety-one days from the end of the decade", escape London's slimy daylight for "a delightful weekend in the country", at the cottage of Withnail's uncle, Monty (Richard Griffiths). At one level, Robinson's revisionary gesture is simple - to present the 60s as an anhedonic decade, by construing sexual liberation as mere material for a tabloid culture that, by 1969, is already pervasive enough to imbue everything with the fetid disposability of cheap, soggy newsprint. I is paranoid, constantly rehearsing the interior monologues that dominate the first part of the film, while Withnail determines to steep every part of his body in alcohol, and remove any traces of having done so, presumably as a way of indirectly addressing some more revolting, pervasive liquid that not even his meticulous examinations of his own urine and phlegm, or his car's hyperactive windscreen-wipers, can fully expel. In the same way, the duo's experience of nature, and the countryside, is unhappy and anticlimactic - I's redemptive, romantic vision of a lake is quickly obscured by bleary, dreary rain, as if to generalise the opening connections between toilet and bath water to the water cycle itself, while the movement from public housing to something more like traditional private property raises Withnail's paranoia to unbearable proportions, and heightens his boiled-egg eyes and pasty skin to a fluorescent pitch: "These are the kind of windows faces look in at!" What prevents this pessimism ever feeling misanthropic is the presence of Uncle Monty, whose homosexual hedonism is decidedly unliberated, more akin to late nineteenth-century decadence than mid-century pleasure - and it's this disparity between decadence and liberation that drives the film, which Robinson understands as a disparity between a delight in euphemism and a distrust of euphemism, if only because decadence isn't particularly interested in disrupting or even addressing the moral order that enforces euphemism in the first place. Released at a time when homosexuality was starting to be widely de-euphemised, and set during a time when the conditions for that process were being laid, the film ultimately begs the extent to which the interest, or identity, of a particular group is bound up in the euphemisms it can devise for itself - and it's this question that prevents Monty's character ever feeling particularly exploitative, just because he becomes continuous with a whole British tradition of etiquette and euphemism, of "sensitive crimes" made sensitive by virtue of being labelled criminal. That said, it's not that Robinson understands homosexuality as the death of England - there's no homophobic subtext here - but more that he understands the process of coming out as a kind of disavowal of homosexuality's very Englishness. It's an unusual, even paradoxical position, and one that's only really viable on the cusp of visibility, or outing, and perhaps finds its closest approximation, tonally, in Monty's insistence that I acknowledge his true sexual inclinations - an insistence that is about as far from a coming-out mentor as it's possible to imagine, and perhaps explains why I is never given a proper name, in a kind of fusion of naming and outing. At its strongest, the film plays as nostalgia for everything euphemistically homosexual about British culture - and it's this that makes Robinson's theatrical register work, and prevents an affected script ever feeling affected, just because it's not a typical nostalgia for the theatre as a splendidly isolated, supposedly highbrow cultural institution, but nostalgia for the theatricality of everyday life, with the result that Withnail's concluding delivery of a monologue from Hamlet manages - astonishingly - to avoid contrivance or pretension, instead feeling like a straightforward expression of his feelings, of the melancholy langour suffusing his relations with his 'uncle'.