Every Thursday we recommend something available streaming on Netflix.
Given how prevalent movies about romantic breakups are, it's a little surprising there aren't more movies about the parting of friends, which happens, in my experience, at least as if not far more often. Maybe it's because ending a friendship, like starting one, tends to be casual, even if the effects are lasting. Terry Zwigoff made his name in comedy with Ghost World, about two women who take diverging paths toward adulthood (he would cement his cult superstardom, of course, with his next film, Bad Santa), and there are echoes of that predicament in the recent Greta Gerwig-starring film Frances Ha. There's been even less in that vein about men. With one important exception: Withnail & I, about the dissolution of a truly terrible male friendship. It's viciously funny, sad, honest, and impossible not to relate to.
"I" remains just that, nameless, which is the first tell. This is a movie about Withnail's outsize effect on the meek narrator, a story of codependency. (Withnail is played by Richard E. Grant, launching a career of wonderful schmucks.) Both are chronically underemployed actors in London. Both drink more than they should, though Withnail seems incapable of stopping. And both encourage each other into the kinds of ill-advised adventures you might expect from drunk people with no jobs and a theatrical sensibility. In the notorious opening sequence, Withnail, suffering from a lack of heat and booze, downs a bottle of lighter fluid. He has to be stopped from finding another.
The plot, to the extent that there is one, involves the characters taking a trip to get away from all that has plagued them in the city. Naturally, they bring the plague with them. They drink along the way to a dank country town where Withnail's uncle has a house. Once there, they can barely find any food, though they can still find liquor. They believe a local farmer has designs on killing them. An intruder turns out to be the uncle, Monty, an oblivious older gay man who preys on the narrator. Like almost everything else that befalls them, this turns out to be Withnail's fault, too.
There is no resting because the characters don't know how to rest. We can see that neither is really happy in their friendship, yet they don't know any other way to manage. They start fights in pubs or debate with their too-high-to-function drug dealer because it seems better than thinking about their own failure. Their escapism has lapsed to a point in their thirties where it has become the thing they need to escape.
And so it ends. The action of Withnail & I is packed into a brief holiday, but it's based on the writer-director Bruce Robinson's life in the 1960s. You can feel those years of self-debasement in every moment, every line, every setup, every punch line. (Authenticity like this doesn't come easy.) Eventually, the meek dependent has to get out. The breakup seems sort of sweet at first, but then it turns out it's not at all. Though friendship often looks casual and hilarious, there can be raging bitterness lying underneath, just as with everything. This is why Withnail & I is considered a "black comedy," though I've always taken issue with that term. Have you been to a comedy show recently? It's all pretty black. The worst comedies are the white ones, in which all the good lines are buffed into lame family friendliness. There's no buffing in Withnail & I, which is why it's certainly the funniest and possibly the truest comedy about male friendship, since comedy is all about recognizing the discomfort we're all feeling and not talking about.
Watch on Netflix now.
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