Withnail & I
Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths
Director: Bruce Robinson
No film is more saturated with alcohol and its consequences than Withnail & I, but on a deeper level, it's also about the biggest hangover, the one suffered by an era (the 60s) intoxicated with itself.
Repeatedly voted among the best films of the past few decades, the prosaic plot - out-of-work actors Withnail and Marwood leave London for a break at a cottage owned by the former's Uncle Monty who turns up and tries to seduce the latter - is memorable for its astonishingly fluid, supple and quotable script, and for some of the finest acting you'll ever see.
Paul McGann as Marwood brings grace and gentility, along with a nervy equanimity, to the role of 'I' - part collaborator, part hanger-on caught up in Withnail's alcoholic slipstream. But Richard E. Grant steals the film as Withnail - witty, manic, bitter, devastatingly charismatic yet ultimately unpalatable. The supporting cast is pitch perfect, in particular Richard Griffiths as the eccentric Monty, and Ralph Brown as laconic philosopher-drug dealer Danny.
The film even spawned numerous drinks orders in real life, from the prosaic ('two large gins, two pints of cider, ice in the cider') to the truly distressing (a drinking game which involves trying to keep up with everything Withnail consumes in the film: 13 glasses of whisky and more than nine of red wine, plus quantities of gin, sherry, cider, ale and lighter fluid (this is generally not advised by most family practitioners).
Above all, this is an unusually realistic depiction of drunkenness. Part of it was not only real but also vividly new, as the teetotal Grant was forced by writer-director Bruce Robinson to get drunk during filming; it coaxed the greatest performance of his career out of him. Likewise, the liquid in the lighter fluid-drinking scene was vinegar, and the look of horror and disgust on Grant's face is genuine.
