Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) has one of the great scripts, with skies that are "beginning to bruise", a landlord "who was coming over all bald" and a pair of heroes who "are drifting into the arena of the unwell". Paul McGann is "I" (the script calls him Marwood), a mild-mannered actor who decamps to the country for the weekend with boozing, carousing flatmate Withnail (Richard E. Grant) - an eternally inebriated bull artist and wannabe thespian - and the unwelcome Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths). There they battle against supposed starvation, fear grown of disorientation and alcohol, and the advances of predatory homosexual Monty, who has his eye on I.
The plotting is virtually non-existent, but the dialogue is sensational and Grant's theatrics as the gaunt, wild-eyed Withnail are the stuff of legend - culminating in a heartbreaking spot of Hamlet in the pouring rain. McGann, in his more restrained part, is also superb, while Griffiths oscillates between being affectingly vulnerable and hilariously irritating and weird with admirable regularity. Though there are moments of conventionality that jar with the brilliance frequently dripping from Robinson's pen - including some "fish out of water" stuff that could have come straight from The Egg & I - and Ralph Brown is a bit one-note (and a bit much) as a frazzled drug dealer, there isn't a half-minute that passes without some moment of borderline genius or a disarmingly hysterical joke. Though superficially dealing with excess and the foreign nation that is the English countryside, Withnail & I is really a film about self-destruction, self-delusion and friendship, as one young man heads for the big-time and another for the alcoholics' ward. As a comedy, it's virtually matchless - as a tale of lost dreams, heartbreaking.
Trivia notes: Robinson boiled down three years' of experiences in a shared flat in London to a narrative spanning two weeks. Withnail is based on Vivian MacKerrell, a friend who talked about how he was the best at everything, "but never did anything" - in Robinson's words. Uncle Monty was famously inspired by the writer-director's experience of working for Italian filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli, who supposedly pursued the boyish Robinson after casting him in Romeo and Juliet. The line: "Are you a sponge or a stone?", is apparently ripped from that encounter.
