There have been a lot of actors to play the Doctor over on Doctor Who. The dark comedy Withnail and I actually stars two of them from the time before they were cast as the Doctor. Sort of. While Paul McGann would go on to be the official Eighth Doctor, Richard E Grant was sort of the Ninth in an unofficial animated web series and played a version of the Doctor for a comedy sketch. While he would eventually appear on the official series as a guest star villain, his time as the Doctor is noteworthy for the sake of this introduction and not much else.
Eh, I would have tried to work that in somewhere eventually if I know me as well as I do.
Two actors in 1960s London are down on their luck. Withnail (Grant) is an alcoholic who seems to wear squalor like a badge of honor. The other guy, “and I” in the closing credits unnamed in the movie, but referred to as Marwood pretty much everywhere else, (McGann) is more contemplative and, unlike Withnail, actually gets the occasional audition. The only company they get in their rodent-infested flat is their drug dealer Danny (Ralph Brown). Withnail seems to be losing it in the mind of his friend, so there may be only one thing to do: go out to the country for a bit of a holiday.
That means getting permission to use a rural cottage belonging to Withnail’s wealthy Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), a man they think might be both gay and into Marwood. From there, the trip becomes the expected comedy of errors in many ways. Withnail and Marwood don’t really know how to do much of anything and don’t fit in out in the country. Then again, they don’t really fit in too well in London either. These are two men who can only really get along with each other, or at the least, Marwood may be the one person who can really get along with the difficult Withnail, a man who never met a bad idea he didn’t think he could pull off.
As a movie, this isn’t so much a plot heavy movie as a character-based one. Grant’s Withnail is such a delightfully belligerent misanthrope, a man who would rather be drinking than doing anything responsible. He’s an actor, but he seems to lack hustle and seems more inclined to simply yell at his agent over a public phone, and that’s when he’s not sitting around his messy flat in an open robe and wearing only a soiled-looking pair of underpants. It may not be so much that other people don’t like spending time with him as much as he’s a man whose general appearance probably scares away most people, particularly as seen when a belligerent patron at their local pub seems to shout abuse at Marwood for no better reason than he doesn’t like the looks of the two men.
As for McGann’s Marwood, he seems to be the responsible one, and it fits that the movie ends where he might actually have some acting work that requires him to leave Withnail behind. While I wouldn’t call Marwood to be a, shall we say, well-adjusted person, he certainly comes across as the more competent of the two. At the very least, he’s trying. It makes for an interesting comedic character study as neither seems to know exactly what they’re doing, but the question of being loyal to a friend whose antics just seem to make a bad existence worse seems to be the the key to the comedy. And it’s a key put to good use in this case.
Grade: B+
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