Discover why Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I is a must-read for screenwriters looking to study timeless dialogue and unforgettable characters.
By Martin Keady
In a new series for Script Lab, Martin Keady, our resident cinema historian, examines The Greatest Screenplays: scripts that every screenwriter should read and learn from. He begins with Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical classic about a pair of unemployed actors trying to get their wits together in the countryside at the end of the 1960s.
You know a screenplay is great when you have read it over a hundred times, and it still yields new insights and delights. And lest anyone accuse me of hyperbole, that is at least the number of times that I read the screenplay for Withnail and I while researching and writing my contributions to Withnail and I: From Cult To Classic, the book about the film produced by the author and designer Toby Benjamin.
Few screenplays, if any, reward such voluminous rereading, but Withnail and I certainly does. Indeed, to paraphrase just one of its many magnificent pieces of dialogue, it contains “the finest lines available to humanity.”
Even if I were to put aside my contributions to the book, I have still written far more about Withnail and I than I have any other screenplay in more than a decade of writing for The Script Lab. Indeed, it was my numerous pieces for The Script Lab about the film that first alerted Toby Benjamin to my love for it, including my declaration in a piece written nearly 10 years ago (The Forty Greatest Screenplays Ever Written) that it was the only screenplay that could match Casablanca (1942) for sheer quotability, such that virtually every line, no matter how seemingly trivial, could be quoted and indeed was constantly quoted.
However, while Casablanca is almost universally hailed as one of the greatest screenplays ever written, if not the greatest screenplay, Withnail and I is, by comparison, relatively little known, especially in America. Consequently, I hope that this article goes some small way towards raising its profile in America and alerting US screenwriters to the existence of the greatest screenplay they have probably never read.
Withnail and I: The Backstory
Perhaps the first thing to say about the screenplay for Withnail and I is that it is just one element (albeit probably the most important element) of a perfect film. By “perfect,” I mean a film in which every single element, from the opening credits to the closing score (and encompassing everything in between), is of a uniformly outstanding quality. There is no miscast minor actor or awful backdrop-to-a-moving-car à la so many Alfred Hitchcock movies to make it lose its spell over a viewer for even a single moment.
In Withnail and I, the directing, acting, cinematography, editing, music, and everything else (set design, costume, hair, etc.) that makes up the movie is absolutely superb, such that it can be legitimately described as being perfect or as perfect as any human creation can ever be.
That is especially true of the screenplay, which in Britain has made it as legendary as any screenplay ever written. Indeed, the “backstory” to Withnail and I is itself worthy of being filmed, as it took its Robinson over a decade to complete, culminating in George Harrison reading it on a transatlantic flight and agreeing to produce it (for HandMade Films, the production company he had founded in 1978) as soon as the plane had landed.
What Makes a Great Screenplay?
As with any screenplay, the two most important elements of Withnail and I are its plotting and dialogue, both of which are exceptional, albeit for completely different reasons.
The Plot
The plot is simple, if not perfunctory. At the end of the 1960s (literally, as the action of the film takes place in the last few months of 1969), two out-of-work actors (the titular Withnail and I, who is named in the script as Marwood) emerge from their latest episode of Bacchanalian excess and decide that what they require is a break in the country, in keeping with the then-current trend among British bands, notably Traffic, to leave the city and record in more rural surroundings.
As I/Marwood puts it, with his usual mixture of plain talk and poetry: “What we need is harmony. Fresh air. Stuff like that.”
Being impoverished (even though Withnail comes from a wealthy family, albeit one he is largely estranged from), the pair resort to palling up to Withnail’s Uncle Monty, the one member of his extended family who he finds less than completely disagreeable, perhaps partly because Monty himself had “crept the boards in my youth” (i.e. acted). Monty duly lends them the key to his remote country cottage, which is more falling-down shack than a rural idyll, and the two set off from London for the Lake District, which is literally at the other end of England, for “a delightful weekend in the country.”
What ensues is anything but “delightful,” as Withnail and I/Marwood are set upon by amorous bulls, vengeful poachers, and ultimately Uncle Monty who, in the last days before homosexuality is fully legalized and generally accepted in Britain, has taken a shine to I/Marwood and consequently sets out to join him at the cottage.
This swift summation of the plot of Withnail and I was further summarised by one reviewer of the film as being, “Here. There. Here.” That line is a nod to a line in the script, namely the three-word note left by the poacher (when he is feeling less vengeful) alongside the rabbit he eventually decides to give Withnail and I: “Here, hare, here!”
In truth, there is little more to the supposed “storyline” of Withnail and I than this flitting between London and the Lake District, or between the city and the countryside. And yet Withnail and I is arguably the greatest example in cinema of the old dictum in literature that the greatest stories are those in which nothing happens but everything changes.
Nothing (or more accurately not much) actually happens in Withnail and I, yet everything changes for the titular pair, particularly I/Marwood, who gradually realizes that his supposed friend is actually utterly selfish and even prepared to risk his physical safety to get what he wants, most notably when he admits to I/Marwood that he had told Monty that I/Marwood was homosexual to gain access to his country retreat.
Ultimately, I/Marwood gains revenge by rejecting Withnail at the end of the film when he goes off to an acting job in Manchester, and Withnail is left to rot, alone, in the rat-infested flat that he now faces eviction from.
Among all its other achievements, Withnail and I is arguably the film that best demonstrates that a plot or storyline does not have to be epic, or even obviously dramatic, to be incredibly powerful and affecting.
In the story of one man coming to terms with the exploitative nature of the friendship that he has become entangled in, and finally escaping from it, Withnail and I captures the truth about so many relationships (especially so many male friendships) that have somehow continued long after they have become completely toxic.
‘Withnail and I’ (1987)
Great Dialogue
The second essential element of any great screenplay is great dialogue, and this is where Withnail and I really comes into its own.
If its plot is relatively ordinary, its dialogue is absolutely extraordinary, which is why I argued over a decade ago (an argument that I stand by today) that only Casablanca comes close to matching its seemingly infinite quotability.
The first exchange of dialogue in the film is mundane, involving I/Marwood asking (an unseen) Withnail whether he would like a cup of tea and Withnail (still unseen) replying, “No.” Yet in the café that Marwood decamps to, his first voiceover sets the tone for the flights of fancy, which are simultaneously poetic and defiantly prosaic, that he will often embark on during the rest of the film: “13 million Londoners have to cope with this, and baked beans and All-Bran and rape? And I’m sitting in this bloody shack and I can’t cope with Withnail. I must be out of my mind. I must go home at once and discuss his problems in depth.”
He does return home to Withnail but he emphatically does not “discuss his problems in depth” (problems that include a degree of self-absorption that would put Narcissus to shame). Instead, those “problems” are largely avoided until they can be avoided no more, and I/Marwood finally confronts Withnail, albeit in a decidedly non-confrontational way, at the end of the film.
In between, Robinson’s immaculate dialogue, honed over more than a decade and countless drafts of a screenplay that originally began as a novel, encompasses almost everything, or at least everything that was foremost in the minds of young people like Withnail and I/Marwood at the end of the 1960s: wealth and status, with Withnail saying of the cottage key he secures from Monty, “Free to those that can afford it. Very expensive to those that can’t”; politics, with Uncle Monty proclaiming that England and particularly those of his upper class have been “Shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labour”; and even the Sixties themselves, with Drug Dealer Danny lamenting, “We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over. They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths. It is 91 days to the end of the decade and as Presuming Ed [his black sidekick and drug mule] here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.”
Perhaps the only universal human obsession that is not directly addressed is sex, and yet it is there throughout the film, hiding, as it were, in plain sight.
In the first instance, it is there in the character of Uncle Monty, the old and “raving homosexual” (as I/Marwood describes him) who pursues younger flesh, whether or not that younger flesh is interested in him. Ultimately it is there in the very last line of the film, in which Withnail quotes Hamlet to convey his Hamlet-like disgust with the world (including I/Marwood) that has rejected him: “Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither.” The fact that this brilliantly delivered soliloquy, which proves that Withnail really can act, is delivered only to the disinterested wolves at London Zoo says it all about Withnail’s so-called “career” as an actor and, arguably, human ambition in general.
Robinson was an actor and for a time after leaving drama school a successful one at that, until he slipped into the post-drama school squalor that is alternatively celebrated and castigated in Withnail and I. Eventually, he stopped being an actor and became a writer—a great writer, as is proven by the script for Withnail and I alone. But he clearly never lost the actor’s ear for unforgettable dialogue and employed it to spectacular effect in his greatest screenplay.
See Withnail and I, and Read It for Yourself
Having seen and read Withnail and I so many times, especially while researching and writing a book about it, I can personally testify to its compelling, indeed haunting, genius.
But don’t take my word for it. If you haven’t seen or read it for yourself, do so as soon as possible, because I can virtually guarantee that you will enjoy it and be illuminated by it. And even if you have seen or read it before, see and read it again, because no other screenplay, with the possible exception of Casablanca, repays multiple viewings or readings so handsomely.
