“Unraveling the Genius: How ‘Withnail and I’ Crafted the Most Iconic Lines in Film History”
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.”
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