This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

In my opinion, this is a pointless movie. I just don't get it. Am I missing something? I see other IMDb users are giving it favorable reviews.I watched this on DVD at a weekly "movie night" gathering. Not one viewer laughed throughout this entire alleged comedy. Being an American and unaccustomed to English accents, we had so much difficulty understanding the dialog, we had to turn on the closed captioning. Even that did not help. Could someone please explain the appeal of this film? I am baffled.

The start of this excellent film features a dysfunctional, hypochondriac English actor & some equally strange friends who provide a hilarious insight into a period, it's like of which will never again be seen. trying to survive on benefits in a depressing, run down part of West London. The leading actor plays an unemployed, obviously 'high- born' Thespian, with aspiration of grander things, with contacts in circles which bely his personal financial state. But that economically challenged state means his flatmate and his friends live in an extremely frugal way. Even though his circumstances are very relevant to that period, his persona and his experiences are very relevant to modern London.

Comedy is seen as an everlasting stable of the British film industry and British culture in general. There are many great comedies from the nation and one of the most highly regarded films is Bruce Robinson's semi-biographical film, Withnail and I.Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and the unnamed "I" (Paul McGann) are two unemployed actors living in a squalid flat in Camden Town, London in 1969. Withnail is highly theatrical alcoholic and I is a more level headed and neurotic personality. Desperate to get away from London, Withnail asks his flamboyant Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) to stay in his cottage in the Lake District. But the pair's friendship is tested, due to the dilapidated conditions of the cottage, horrible wet weather, hostile locals and Monty' s sexual advances towards I.Withnail and I was a big flop when it was first released back in 1987 but found a second life thanks to the home video market and most importantly of all, university film societies. Now, the film is a cult classic, seen as compulsory viewing for any university student who considers themselves a film fan in the UK.There are two key reasons why Withnail and I is such a beloved film, the first being the script (particularly the dialogue) and the performances from Grant and McGann. Withnail and I is very quotable film, filled with witty and hilarious monologues and exchanges between the characters, as they navigate through more farcical situations together.Grant and McGann had a great working relationships, providing plenty of comic energy and had the chemistry the film needed. Grant was able to brings a lot of bravado as Withnail who has a theatrical delivery and attire, while McGann is the straight-man of the pair, yet still provides plenty of laughs. Both actors complemented Robinson's dialogue, enhancing the comedy, while Robinson uses a few visual gags and set pieces to make the audience laugh.Along with Grant and McGann, Withnail and I features a memorable supporting cast of British and Irish actors. The most notable are Griffiths as Uncle Monty, who's always trying get his way with I, yet has some moments of humanity and Danny, the philosophical drug dealer played by Alien 3's Ralph Brown. It is easy to see how Danny was an influence for the character of Super Hans in the sitcom Peep Show (if you have not seen Peep Show you should do so immediately).Withnail and I is not all comedy, it follows the old maxim of 'make them laugh, make them cry'. The friendship between Withnail and I does deteriorate during their holiday and the ending is tender, sombre and respectful towards the characters.Withnail and I is a classic comedy because its fantastically written characters, their dialogue with each other and the performances from the whole cast. There is a great recreation of the 1960′s with a soundtrack featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles.Withnail and I also spawned a drinking game where participants need to copy what Withnail drinks: this features nine and half glasses of red wine, half a pint of cider, two and half shots of gin, six glasses of sherry, thirteen glasses of whisky, half a pint of ale and a shot of lighter fluid. If you try this, you will most certainly need your stomach pumped.

This takes a pretty ferocious look at modern life, a gray British life to be sure but it more generally directs its disillusionment towards a global generation that could even faintly remember the Stones and Vietnam, or at least grew up on that certain charged dream.It is about the dissatisfaction bred by city life, the misery and sense of sickness, more pronounced of course. Now we have settled down, we are beginning find transcendence in this world. Two down-on-their-luck actors take a trip to the countryside, there fail to find much cleansing and report back to normative life, Withnail to return to his hazy half- life of drinking and vexation, the narrator to go on to a 'normal' life.Their groundlessness with all its freedom has no reflection merely anxiety and madness, and finding an anchor, as it happens in the end, means becoming an actor on the stage, assuming again the old narrative. Sure it is hilarious to watch, but deep down it is a tremendously sad film.Here is where another quality of the film manifests, British. The Brits are trapped in a historical narrative, anchored in Shakespeare and the old empire. Their films when they channel that self are verbose, logical, theatrical, hardly visual outside a square narrative space. Smart, expertly narrated, impeccably acted; but hardly what I'd call contemplative.Lawrence of Arabia could only find contemplation in a desert that was precisely somewhere else, by adopting a new self for whom that desert could be an uncertain abode. For Dennis Potter, closer to my taste, the encounter with the viewer who looks back at himself happened in old songs and movies.So when the Brits rebel against that which is so ingrained in them, story, the results generally tend to be thin. Merely squashing story is liberating enough, refreshing of its own. This is not so thin as the Pythons but still in a similar vein of situational disorder, skidding from one prank to the next. Implicitly, however, the filmmaker who also wrote this, knows that he is not doing a collection of skits. The film's title is a clue. There is an I here for whom the story exists as both world and hazy recollection. A writer, one of the two actors, is our troubled narrator, Withnail a sort of fractured self lost in delirium and outgrown in the end.So we have this British rebellion against the yoke of narrative in a clear way. Everywhere they go they become actors, they constantly reinvent themselves, imagine narrative, you'll see this in every situation from the scuffle in the pub early to the poacher who is out to kill them.And this yields both comedy and inner pain, coming from a sensitivity to the cruelties of normalcy. It's as if life cannot be approached simply, the absurd spectacle reconciled with, say a poacher with eels down his pants—it is to them a source of fear and vexation precisely because it doesn't make much apparent sense. This gonzo style obviously emulates Hunter Thompson, in fact the promotional material for the film are designed in Thompson's vein by his cartoonist since the Kentucky Derby days, Steadman. Gilliam in his Fear and Loathing went overboard in trying to actually portray a drugged perception, but it was his way of preserving the essence of a world at a certain remove and the self tearing at the viewing walls.It fits here like a charm against the mannered world of the Brits until the silly bit with the gay uncle derails the second half—from that point because suddenly the urges make sense, there is story and it is pretty unambiguous and certain. So unwittingly it falls back to that British trap that it was trying to claw its way from.The filmmaker would return to Thomson with Rum Diary, this much better captures the spirit.