‘Withnail and I’ 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: The Criterion Collection

As a part of an essay cycle that roves the cinema of the Nineties for vestiges of clever life, Phillip Lopate identifies a number of attributes that typify the early fashion of author turned administrators: creatively interpolated exposition, admirably ham-fisted mise-en-scène, and skewedly erudite characters amongst them. The blistering dyad of flicks that British writer Bruce Robinson produced with HandMade Movies within the late ’80s proudly manifests all of those, and provides one by the use of aggressive underscoring: an acerbic worldview.

One can’t blame Lopate for overlooking this high quality, as there’s nothing within the debuts of David Mamet or Paul Schrader on par with Robinson’s reckless piss and vinegar. Home of Video games and Blue Collar possess a artful bleakness, to make certain, however a contemporary fable whereby the physique of an promoting exec is commandeered by a sentient, puss-dribbling shoulder boil suggests unprecedented vocational spite. As with each Mamet and Schrader, nonetheless, Robinson playfully makes use of movie as a sensual extension of language (evens followers are likely to reward his work as if it had been illustrated dialogue); the lysergic situations and scene-nibbling actors make his wit seem so limitless that its targets are rendered defenseless.

Each Withnail and I and Get Forward in Promoting are exemplars of the “hateful paean” custom, salvos of social disgust crammed uneasily with self-deprecating doubt. If the previous appears the weaker of the 2, it’s solely as a result of de-glamorizing the boho-isms of the late ’60s has fallen in and out of fashion a number of instances (our tradition’s paradoxical reliance on—and lack of belief in—advertising and marketing, however, solely continues to evolve and fester). Initially conceived as a novel, Withnail and I is Robinson’s “Concern and Loathing Via the English Nation,” a burnt-out ode to each city and metropolis faux-artistry squalor and a stoner bromance par excellence.

Within the movie, two out-of-work thespians and flatmates (Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann) in 1969, uninterested in London’s soot-stained, fish ‘n’ chip paper urbanity, con a wealthy relative into providing the important thing to his cottage in Cumbria. What follows is a frenzied fog of booze-fueled betrayals and comedian misunderstandings that finally divulge to the duo the poisonous nature of their dynamic.

There are, curiously, few narcotics concerned apart from alcohol, which is so desperately sought that lighter fluid is gleefully imbibed in a single scene, and an epic spliff rolled by a cockney cohort, Danny (Ralph Brown). However, taking cues from idol Hunter S. Thompson, whose occasional illustrator/collaborator Ralph Steadman supplied Withnail and I’s promotional artwork, Robinson likens the demise of the Summer time of Like to a foul drug journey, sustaining an achily inebriated cadence with paranoid voiceovers and a giddily episodic construction.

The movie’s setting doesn’t demystify the hippie delusion a lot as bathe it in fatigued rancor till it turns into sympathetically plausible; the Hendrix tracks on the soundtrack had been easy-FM picks far earlier than 1986, and the afro-sporting Black he-man that seems within the bathtub throughout act three appears to have wandered in from an off-Broadway manufacturing of Hair. However reasonably than epitomizing the countercultural life-style of the period in extremis as, say, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo did, the 2 titular characters right here patrol its antsy, mournful, disillusioned limits.

Grant’s celebrated efficiency as Withnail (pronounced “whith-null”) grows more and more campy within the rearview; he savors pithily vulgar bon mots like “I’ve acquired a bastard behind the eyes” with sufficient oily dramaturgy to provide you indigestion within the midst of all of your side-splitting contortions. And but, it’s the frothy whirlpool of Withnail’s pouty, selfish over-reactions that attracts us in as mercilessly because it does I, McGann’s uptight, unnamed protagonist and Robinson surrogate. This masochistic stranglehold supplies the movie’s most cogent metaphor for the self-destructiveness that will have ushered us into, in addition to out of, the “revolution” of the Nineteen Sixties.

In Cumbria, the sad couple bicker about whose flip it’s to fetch firewood, upset the locals in a principally fruitless seek for non-fermented sustenance, and discover themselves on the fallacious finish of a shocked eel who’s been docilely occupying a gruff poacher’s trousers. And thru all of it, they nervously roil from the conclusion that the nation is simply as putrid and unwholesome as the town they deserted, an intermittently intelligent analogy for the unrecognized futility of the Age of Aquarius’s free love and corporeal experimentation.

The story virtually fatally swerves into dated socio-political cartoonishness when the brilliantly flaming and ruddily corpulent Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) arrives with plans to seduce the curly haired, boy-faced I. Impressed by the reportedly untoward advances he suffered from director Franco Zeffirelli as a younger, struggling actor, Robinson unfairly fashions Monty as an appalling image of effete, closeted decadence and despondency.

The uncomfortable climax succeeds regardless of Monty’s pointless humiliation due to the homoerotic rigidity that punctures the floor of Withnail and I’s relationship, a partnership that we settle for at misshapen face worth all through. Withnail’s charisma is such that we don’t even acknowledge him as a tragic hero till he hackishly spews a Hamlet soliloquy into the rain after I dumps him for the much less dangerous compromises of maturity and self-sufficient success. The movie’s satire at instances collapses beneath the load of its unkempt irascibility, however the conviction of Robinson’s ire towards a technology led astray is nigh unparalleled in boomer tradition.

Picture/Sound

Criterion’s UHD completely preserves the movie’s sickly magnificence. You may make out each shade of the stressed fundamental characters’ raccoon eyes. The squalor of Nineteen Sixties city Britain and filth of the countryside are equally vivid of their crusty unpleasantness, and the widely darkish lighting of the cinematography by no means evinces any crushing artifacts. The mono soundtrack retains dialogue and ambient sounds clear whereas threading in David Dundas and Rick Wentworth’s mockingly romantic rating and the occasional needle drop of ’60s psychedelic music.

Extras

Criterion’s disc comes with two audio commentaries, one a Covid-era livestream Q&A that includes director Bruce Robinson, and the opposite from 2001 that includes actors Ralph Brown and Paul McGann. Each are plentiful in anecdotes and details about the movie’s making and its enduring reputation. Additionally included is a 1999 making-of documentary, new and archival interviews with Robinson and Richard E. Grant, and a gallery of reference photographs by poster artist Ralph Steadman. In his booklet essay, critic David Cairns lauds Robinson for make one thing as idiosyncratic as Withnail & I, notably singling out his use of lengthy takes to develop the movie’s knife-edge stability of black comedy and pathos.

Total

Criterion’s disc of Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy affords the movie in all its squalid, stained magnificence.