Withnail and I
1987movie
People
Where to Watch
Criterion Channel
HBO MaxCriterion ChannelHBO MaxWithnail and I proudly confronts the nostalgic hue applied to the 1960s, for every Michael Caine or Steve McQueen, there is a Withnail, and there is an “I”. This collision of eras creates a movie with distinction and hilarity, poignance and immaturity, in tandem. Yet, under the flesh of the alcohol-fueled misadventures of the two titular characters, lays a skeleton of the hardship, failure, and ultimate loneliness of one man, while another seeks his destiny, untethered for the first time.
The film’s appeal to undergraduates is perfectly logical, especially to those in their carefree first year, and certainly to those of us who went to university for free. The world represented in Withnail and I mirrors student life, albeit an exaggerated version of it. There’s the drugs, the anarchy, the alcoholic excess, the killing time in the morning waiting for the pubs to open, staying up all night, the hangovers, the mountain of unwashed crockery in the sink, the squalor and the poverty.
