The plot has been summarised by other reviewers to the extent that further comment on that is superfluous.
I have seen this film so many times now that it has quite a different effect on me than it did on first viewing
When I first saw it, it was an unending belly laugh of recognising within the 1960's setting all the madness of my own youth and the general daftness of what went on in the social circles I moved in throughout the 1980s. I found the whole thing side-splittingly funny and every situation seemed more than mildly familiar.
As time moved on, I saw other darker aspects in the film, and now I see it as a terrifying morality piece which harks back to Waugh, Hardy, Dickens and beyond in reflecting the desperate tragedy of doomed and thwarted youth, egotism and ambition. Marwood is lucky, he finds redemption through his own working class common sense and graft, but the deluded pretensions of patrician Withnail condemn him to an impecunious and ultimately tragic existence, forever a victim of his own preconceptions and expectations of life never allowing him to come to terms with the actuality, forcing him to view the world through a haze of drink, drugs and his own arrogance in order to try to make sense of it all. It becomes increasingly clear as the film moves toward its close, and Marwood finally abandons his companion, that Marwood is choosing life over death, and we realise sadly that Withnail, for all his wit and bizarre charm, is already an incompetent, lost, lonely and tragic soul who will live and ultimately die alone, friendless and unfulfilled.
I have seen this film so many times now that it has quite a different effect on me than it did on first viewing
When I first saw it, it was an unending belly laugh of recognising within the 1960's setting all the madness of my own youth and the general daftness of what went on in the social circles I moved in throughout the 1980s. I found the whole thing side-splittingly funny and every situation seemed more than mildly familiar.
As time moved on, I saw other darker aspects in the film, and now I see it as a terrifying morality piece which harks back to Waugh, Hardy, Dickens and beyond in reflecting the desperate tragedy of doomed and thwarted youth, egotism and ambition. Marwood is lucky, he finds redemption through his own working class common sense and graft, but the deluded pretensions of patrician Withnail condemn him to an impecunious and ultimately tragic existence, forever a victim of his own preconceptions and expectations of life never allowing him to come to terms with the actuality, forcing him to view the world through a haze of drink, drugs and his own arrogance in order to try to make sense of it all. It becomes increasingly clear as the film moves toward its close, and Marwood finally abandons his companion, that Marwood is choosing life over death, and we realise sadly that Withnail, for all his wit and bizarre charm, is already an incompetent, lost, lonely and tragic soul who will live and ultimately die alone, friendless and unfulfilled.