Comfort in the unexpected: Withnail and I

The worst of both London and the countryside. A toxic friendship. Enough alcohol and drugs to kill a randy bull. Withnail and I isn’t exactly comforting in a conventional sense. But, oddly enough, it was the first film that came to mind when a close friend asked me my go-to comfort film.

The film follows Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and a character credited only as ‘I’ but named in the script as Marwood (Paul McGann), who attempt to escape London and their self-destructive alcoholism by holidaying in a country cottage, owned by Withnail’s monstrous Uncle Monty, played to odious perfection by Richard Griffiths. While ostensibly a comedy, the film has truly dark moments, from Monty’s predatory nature to the quietly tragic final scene. Why then have I revisited it so much? And why do I find it, in its own way, comforting?

It’s popped up at crucial moments of my life. How relevant a piece of art is to us is so often dependent on when we first experience it - I opened my favourite book, On The Road, during my first independent holiday. Withnail has proved similarly relevant throughout my life. The first time I watched it was right before a nightmarish countryside holiday of my own, the second at a low point in my life alongside two close friends, drunk out of our minds.

But it is the third watch that provided the most comfort to me. I had just been rejected by Guildhall, a drama school who don’t email you a rejection, but turn you down on the day, to your face. I went back home (popping into a pub along the way), put Withnail and I up on my laptop, and yes, felt comforted. It is, ostensibly, a comedy, consistently voted one of the funniest British films. So perhaps I got comfort from it making me laugh. But if it was just laughs that I wanted, I could have gone for something far less complicated that didn’t have all the darkness and discomfort of Withnail.

Maybe it was a comforting sense of superiority; yes I’d been rejected by a drama school, but I wasn’t at the level of these failed actors. I wasn’t reduced to the state of a bum just yet, performing Hamlet to caged wolves. But I think it goes beyond simple schadenfreude. Withnail and Marwood are subjected to a lot of misfortune, but I laugh with them, not at them.

And maybe that’s the key. Despite being often humiliated, the humour is not in the situation, but in the main characters’ responses to said situation; their acerbic, sarcastic, cruel, snarlingly British wit. If I wanted to simply see characters who were having a tougher time than myself, there are any number of films I could have watched. But few films have their characters stick two fingers up at their tough times and growl at their misfortunes with witticisms, “throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness”. Withnail suffers, but he embraces how it gives him something to joke about.

The purpose of comfort films is to, oddly enough, comfort. And to many people, that means a film which is light-hearted, with moments that warm your heart. I love that kind of comfort film too; the Cornetto Trilogy and Some Like It Hot is always close at hand when I need a cheer-up. But often when I’m sad and in need of comfort, something incessantly cheerful and saccharine sweet can be aggravating and too jarring for my current mood to relate to. I want a film where characters are also in awful moods and brutal situations, but who deal with it better than myself. With biting satire and iconic lines, I want them to snarl at grizzly despondency better than I. These films don’t always imply that things will improve, but they always refuse to accept their current situation. That, in its own way, is a comfort.