Latest news with #Withnail
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Beautifully, awfully funny': why Withnail and I is my feelgood movie
In the words of its writer and director, Withnail and I is a comedy that 'doesn't know it's funny'. To its star, it's about 'the nobility of failure'. It ends with its title character alone in the rain, his one friend gone, delivering a Hamlet soliloquy to an indifferent wolf. It's my feelgood movie. Bruce Robinson's British classic was released in 1987. He and Richard E Grant made the remarks above in 2007, at the British Film Institute. I was there, eager to hear Robinson discuss a movie based on his own experience. Themes abide. As he said recently about The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, his imperishable novel about his brutal childhood: 'It's very funny but also sad as fuck.' Robinson's first film was a novel before it was a screenplay. At the BFI, he said he knew he'd got his film right at an early screening, when a 'girl sort of threw up, laughing'. She had a point. Withnail and I is beautifully, awfully funny. It's based on Robinson's life in London in the 1960s. Two actors live in drink and squalor. One has a rich uncle with a house in the country, in the cold and distant north. The actors go there, swapping urban despair for rural horror. The uncle arrives, and attempts to seduce his nephew's friend. The actors return to London, to find a drug dealer asleep in their flat. One actor gets a job. He cuts his hair and leaves. As the late Kevin Jackson wrote: 'Try pitching that one to Dreamworks.' But there's more to the film than action and plot. Jackson also noted Robinson's mastery, how Withnail is a 'classic three-acter as outlined by Ring Lardner. Act One: Send a man up a tree. Act Two: Throw rocks at him. Act Three: Bring him down.' Almost all of Robinson's lines are funny. Not one is meant as a joke. The actors excel, precisely to Robinson's direction. As Withnail, Grant is flailing, vicious, amoral. As Marwood (as Robinson), Paul McGann is beautiful, soused and naive. As Uncle Monty, Richard Griffiths is technically and physically immense, oozing pathos as well as weirdly Bunterish threat. My brother bought Withnail back from Blockbuster. I was 16, keeping a diary, Marwood-esque, full of artful despair. My uncle was visiting, making dinner. If not Monty-esque, he was certainly a lovable rogue. We watched. Spellbound, we rewound the VHS and watched it over again. I loved Dylan and Hendrix on the soundtrack but I loved King Curtis and Al Bowlly too. I loved Robinson's lines and how his actors said them. I loved the moments of surreality – Monty's house of potted vegetables, the policeman's sudden shout – and the flashes of slapstick: Withnail nicked for drunk driving, failing to work the piss-filled device in his trousers. I loved how Grant found space for such physical comedy in Robinson's beautiful script. The tape went back to Blockbuster. I bought my own. I took it to college and watched it drunk and sober, with friends and alone, in halls and in my desperate pit of a house. Through early adulthood, into fatherhood, on DVD then streaming. To watch Withnail is to discover it again. Back home in the north with my brothers, walking the hills where we scattered our dad's ashes, we repeat Robinson's lines as a sort of catechism, swearwords said with vim. Our uncle is gone too. I haven't quoted Robinson's script here. Too obvious. One for the college bar bores. But I will let Robinson quote himself. In 2017, he and Grant returned to the BFI. The actor Withnail was based on, Vivian MacKerrell, never found much work. Like Marwood, Robinson found some. Uncle Monty is based on Franco Zeffirelli, the great director who cast Robinson in Romeo and Juliet, flew him to Rome, and promptly tried to seduce him. Sign up to Film Weekly Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email filled with all the latest news and all the movie action that matters after newsletter promotion 'There's just me and him on the sofa,' Robinson said, audience, interviewer and Grant just trying to hold it together. ''What do you want to drink?' 'Bit of whisky.' And he leans over to me and says, 'Are you a sponge, or a stone?'' In the film, Monty says that to Marwood. At the BFI when I was there, it got the biggest laugh. On film, Marwood tells Monty: 'I voted Conservative.' On Zeffirelli's sofa, Robinson said: 'Bit of both, Franco.' Then he gave the smile he gave his would-be seducer: a shit-scared grin, half-polite, half-panicked, eyes searching for escape, as indelibly played by McGann. Robinson brought the house down. Bliss. Withnail and I is available on Max and the Criterion channel in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK
New European
15-03-2025
- Business
- New European
Brexit Britain is being outstripped by Slovenia and Malta
To call this year's UK Living Standards Review a sobering read is an understatement. The findings of this annual deep-dive are enough to make Patsy Stone, Father Jack Hackett and the Withnail acting family take up Dry January. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) has found that the poorest households in the UK are now worse off than the poorest in Slovenia and Malta. Living standards in the wealthiest bits of the UK are comparable to those in other wealthy countries like France and Germany, but if you were to rank each of 269 European regions in terms of income, the poorest German region would rank 82nd – well above the EU average – and the poorest UK region 193rd – well below the EU average. Want to sober up a bit more? Real incomes in the majority of European regions have grown at a faster rate than those in the UK. Since 2020, the year of the pandemic but also of our official departure from the EU, we have fallen behind the average real wage growth of developed countries. At the turn of the millennium, we had broadly similar wage levels to Norway and Canada, which has since outstripped us. We were well ahead of New Zealand (which overtook UK wages in 2020) and Slovenia (which is set to do so in the next few years). Meanwhile, had UK wages grown as they did in the US after the 2008 financial crisis, UK workers would be £4,300 better off today. The NIESR is getting some stick for not naming Brexit as a direct cause of some of the UK's problems in this report. In fairness, it does note how membership of the European Union's single market has helped growth in some eastern European countries. And the NIESR did publish a big report on Brexit's effects on the UK just 16 months ago which said that the damage to GDP was at 2-3% of GDP in 2023 and would rise to 5-6% of GDP by 2035. This new report makes some short-term recommendations about easing our standard of living crisis – including removing the two-child limit for child benefit – that make for interesting reading as Labour mull cuts to the welfare budget. But in the longer-term, it seems clear that a game-changer is needed to break the spiral of low pay and low growth. Most of us agree on what that game-changer should be, but not everybody. A recent column by the Brexiteer Telegraph journalist Allister Heath began with two sentences that made the NIESR report seem cheerful: 'Britain stands alone in a brutish world. Our small, impoverished yet special nation has spent too long lying to itself'. Heath then stated, correctly, that the US was now a write-off. But some people can't see the obvious when it is staring them in the face. 'Europe isn't the answer,' wrote Heath. 'The EU is an imperialist technocracy with an obsession with Hegelian dialectics and a hatred for traitor-nations that have thrown off the shackles of the acquis communautaire.' To which the only correct responses are a) 'Parklife!' and b) pass that bottle this way, I need a drink.
