If you have any idea what I'm talking about, you may now or ever have been a member of the Withnail and I cult. Bruce Robinson's 1987 film is famously a comedy without jokes, yet as Toby Benjamin's new book on the film accurately observes, "every single line of the screenplay is superb," which I'd slightly amend to "every single line of the screenplay is superbly funny." Vulgarly funny ("I fuck arses"? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses!"), demandingly funny ("We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!"), pathetically funny ("We've gone on holiday by mistake!"), insightfully funny ("They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man."), ominously funny ("If I medicined you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present."), economically funny ("Scrubbers!").
Withnail and I: From Cult to Classic takes a somewhat roundabout route in telling the tale of a film in which nothing much happens aside from two jobless London actors going on an ill-fated rural getaway and getting very drunk very often. Instead of a straight narrative or oral history, the structure mostly consists of dedicated interviews with those who made the film who are still with us. Naturally that means no participation from Richard "Uncle Monty" Griffiths or Michael "Jake the Eel Poacher" Elphick or George "Producer, plus ex-Beatle" Harrison, but all your other faves are here: director/screenwriter Robinson, Richard E. Grant, (Withnail), Paul McGann (Marwood), Ralph Brown ("Danny"), cinematographer Peter Hannan, soundtrack composers David Dundas and Rick Wentworth, hairdresser Sue Love, makeup artist Peter Frampton (no, not that one), etc. Benjamin even chats with Tony "GET IN THE BACK OF THE VAN!" Wise. There are also spotlights for famous fans, such as comedian Margaret Cho, actors Donal Logue and Diane Morgan, Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris, Peep Show co-creator Sam Bain, and Dean "Chainsaw" Cameron, because what is a cult film without its cult?
Through these interviews and the sundry photos (which include snaps of original script pages) that populate Withnail and I: From Cult to Classic, you get a pretty good idea of what made the film special and how it came to be, but I think I would have preferred it if Benjamin had gone with the oral history format to tell a more linear tale. Straight interviews are often enlightening, and the ones in this books regularly are, but that is not the most engrossing format, and it leaves it to the reader to piece the full story together. And how can we be expected to do that when we're all full of scotch, you silly tool?
