A pair of unambitious young actors face the bitter end of the 1960s with a mixture of suspicion, fear, and the sort of paranoia brought about by long stretches of enforced boredom and too many hallucinogenic drugs. In a desperate attempt to 'get away from it all', the arrogant, high-strung Withnail and his equally neurotic companion trade their seedy urban flat (in which all sorts of loathsome creatures lurk among the dirty clothes and unwashed dishes) for the even more claustrophobic confinement of a rustic country cabin. There they encounter more than one unexpected bucolic peril: a recalcitrant chicken; a seemingly antagonistic poacher; and finally Withnail's amorous Uncle Monty, an aging pederast pursuing his nephew's terrified, homophobic friend.
No one who lived through the '60s is likely to remember the decade quite like this...but of course no one who drank as much liquor or dropped as many pills as the arrogant Withnail and his anonymous roommate is likely to remember much of anything. Writer-director Bruce Robinson lends a disarming comic masochism to his own loosely rendered autobiography, creating an oddly eccentric (but not unkind) portrait of two misfits on the edge of a society in transit, both of them out of touch with changing times and facing an uncertain future with equal parts contempt (from Withnail) and paranoia (from his anxious companion).
The film itself is only slightly more eccentric than its characters, but such offbeat originality could only have come from personal experience, and Robinson (author of 'The Killing Fields', and the otherwise unnamed 'I' in this film's title) fills in the blanks with caustic black humor and 20-20 hindsight. Even the flamboyantly self-centered, cynical Withnail earns a degree of sympathy by the film's end, as he wanders off into the rain, a soon to be forgotten relic who couldn't quite adapt to changing times.
No one who lived through the '60s is likely to remember the decade quite like this...but of course no one who drank as much liquor or dropped as many pills as the arrogant Withnail and his anonymous roommate is likely to remember much of anything. Writer-director Bruce Robinson lends a disarming comic masochism to his own loosely rendered autobiography, creating an oddly eccentric (but not unkind) portrait of two misfits on the edge of a society in transit, both of them out of touch with changing times and facing an uncertain future with equal parts contempt (from Withnail) and paranoia (from his anxious companion).
The film itself is only slightly more eccentric than its characters, but such offbeat originality could only have come from personal experience, and Robinson (author of 'The Killing Fields', and the otherwise unnamed 'I' in this film's title) fills in the blanks with caustic black humor and 20-20 hindsight. Even the flamboyantly self-centered, cynical Withnail earns a degree of sympathy by the film's end, as he wanders off into the rain, a soon to be forgotten relic who couldn't quite adapt to changing times.