Couples Therapy

I have never been an autograph seeker. It feels crass, when you’ve spent some time talking to an artist about their work like a fellow professional, to ask them to sign something. But every now and then I make an exception for people whose work has changed my relationship to art, and only if I feel like they’ll understand why I carry that work with me.

Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass and Jon Kane (and Steven Soderbergh) on the Qatsi trilogy. Robert Duvall on The Apostle. Catherine Breillat on a DVD of Fat Girl. Alfonso Cuarón on Children of Men; I asked him to autograph the HD-DVD, I knew he’d appreciate the rarity of it. (Which he did, and then made me promise to get the Blu-ray for the higher bitrate.) I brought her Criterion box to a breakfast with Agnès Varda, but when I realized I was twenty years older than all the other journalists there I felt it would be too awkward to ask her to sign it.

And I asked Bruce Robinson to sign my copy of his screenplays for Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising.

This was in 1992, in Los Angeles for the press junket for Robinson’s underrated Hollywood thriller Jennifer Eight – and five years before Withnail and Advertising would join the Criterion Collection on LaserDisc. Both films would be among Criterion’s earliest DVDs, as well, but they’d go out of print fairly quickly, surpassed in both presentation and curation by various US and UK labels. I have owned four different Blu-ray releases of Withnail in my time, each with something unique to recommend it: A commentary track, a documentary, a featurette, even a bonus Blu-ray of Advertising unavailable anywhere else. And now, at last, Criterion has regained the rights to both films, bringing us the definitive 4K and Blu-ray editions that arrived earlier this week.

To understand Withnail and I, one must understand where it came from. After a remarkably peripatetic career that included acting in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers and François Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. and writing Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, which nabbed him an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA win, Robinson used his cachet to write and direct a tiny, personal movie about two actors in Camden Town who try to escape their impoverished, unemployable misery – and the end of the ’60s – by going on holiday to a posh uncle’s country house, only to discover a new level of despair.

Withnail and I is an opera of bad luck and worse choices, its grimy, unwashed protagonists squabbling and wailing their way through a series of misunderstandings and confrontations, panicked and shaking in wide-eyed withdrawal from any number of substances. It is also one of the funniest films ever made, once you get past all the vomiting.

I don’t know that Robinson meant to make a cult comedy. I mean, of course he did, the film is funny on purpose, its dialogue magnificently crafted to ramble around to immaculate punchlines (“this is why bald people are uptight”) or deliver machine-gun arguments that slowly resolves into an absurdist aria (“the wankers on the meths can’t afford it”). But I don’t think he ever expected the film to connect with audiences on the scale that it did – embracing it as an art-house version of a Cheech and Chong movie, watching Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and Paul McGann’s Robinson surrogate Marwood (“I”, in the credits) stumble around in a state of perpetual delirium, barging into a posh café at tea-time to thumb their snot-caked noses at the squares, smash some plates and swan out in triumph. The audience at the Bloor Cinema in the late ’80s applauded that scene. I’m still not certain Robinson wanted them to.

But in fairness, the movie does do all the things one expects from counterculture comedy. It’s just that everything is coated in a thick sheen of melancholy, an understanding that this life is ultimately unsustainable. They bring chaos wherever they go, but Withnail and Marwood aren’t getting away with anything; everything they do has a price, and the comedy comes from them trying to avoid paying it. This is one of the rare films about intoxication that understands the desperation behind its characters’ antics, and ends on a note of genuine tragic beauty when Marwood finally outgrows his friend and decides to move on – only to have Withnail respond with a monologue from Hamlet that confirms his incandescent, unmanageable talent.

It’s a brilliant performance, and we’re the only ones who’ll ever see it. Robinson makes the moment land like a sledgehammer; if you leave the theater smiling, you’ve missed the bloody point.

Grant and Robinson would reunite for How to Get Ahead in Advertising three years later, a comedy in which Grant played the equally loquacious but slightly more presentable Denis Bagley, an advertising executive in Thatcher's England who one day decides he can no longer live with the mendacity and cynicism of his industry.

But before he can have his Jerry Maguire moment, sprouts a talking boil that eventually supplants him, birthing a new, improved Bagley with none of the pesky ethics or decency. He's even able to patch things up with his understandably worried wife (Rachel Ward). The film even ends with Grant delivering another triumphant monologue, the better to make sure no one misses the point this time.

Unlike Withnail, Advertising was not embraced as a cult classic; reviews were mixed, some calling Robinson’s script didactic or sclerotic. Now, of course, it plays like a warning: Robinson saw our current post-truth reality coming, laying out the interdependency of media and advertisers, and the way language can be deployed to shape public opinion, in one brilliant scene early in the film. I think about pork pies and peanut butter far more often than I ought to these days. And in the absurdity of Bagley’s sneering, ranting Boil, he hit on a perfect delivery mechanism: The Boil is a monster, sure, but it’s also correct in its vision of the future as one defined by buzzwords, manufactured consent and the promise of quick fixes. We just chose to ignore it, and look where that got us.

Criterion’s upgraded Withnail offers a loving 4K restoration of the film that cleans up the image without cleaning it up at all, honoring its dim lighting and ramshackle locations. The movie’s still as shabby and grimy as ever, bless its heart. Audio is the original mono, as Robinson and God intended.

Most of the supplements are pre-existing – an audio commentary with McGann and co-star Ralph Brown recorded for the Anchor Bay disc, the half-hour documentary Withnail and Us from the subsequent Arrow special edition, a Robinson commentary recorded in 2020 for an Esquire UK livestream event and a gallery of Ralph Steadman’s set photos – but there’s also a new featurette in which Robinson and Grant discuss the film and the way their collaboration shaped both their careers.

It’s a shame they had to be recorded separately, because their chemistry is wonderful – as you’ll see in the half-hour BFI panel that reunited them in 2017, for a conversation after a 30^th anniversary screening of Withnail. Robinson and Grant have a wonderful time stepping on each other’s stories, correcting this anecdote or adding detail to another, with moderator Justin Johnson doing his best to keep them on track or place a given moment in context. It’s a pleasure to watch, and it was clearly a joy for Grant, who grins through the whole thing. Makes you wish you’d been there, really.

Advertising – mastered from a 2K restoration and thus Blu-ray only, but still looking very good – offers just one supplement, a featurette in which Robinson and Grant, recorded in the same sessions as their Withnail interviews, go through the making of the film and the political climate in which it was produced and released.

Perhaps because they haven’t had as many opportunities to go over this project, both artists have a lot to say – the piece runs nearly half an hour, twice the length of the Withnail featurette – with Grant digging into the technical challenges of working with prosthetics and acting to a dodgily synchronized video of himself and Robinson discussing the Thatcherism that his script was responding to. They both acknowledge the film’s “manic, didactic” quality, but I don’t think it’s the weakness they believe it was: The tone is the product of Robinson’s genuine rage at the state of the world and our collective refusal to change course. And Grant channels it like a god.

And speaking of protagonists who rant and rave in the name of truth-telling, this Tuesday Shout! Studios releases a new 4K edition of Martin Brest’s 1992 drama Scent of a Woman – the film that won Al Pacino an Oscar for playing Al Pacino, basically.

A loose remake of the 1974 Italian drama Profumo di Donna, Brest’s version – written by Bo Goldman – is a buddy picture starring Chris O’Donnell as Charlie Simms, a New England prep-school kid whose headmaster is pressuring him to fink on the other students who staged a prank. But before the tribunal meets, Charlie must spend Thanksgiving weekend minding cranky old Frank Slade (Pacino), a decorated veteran who lost his sight in an accident and has descended into alcoholism and self-loathing – which he’s more than happy to direct at anyone unlucky enough to be near him.

Over the long weekend – which involves trips to New York and White Plains, turning the film into a sort of road movie – Frank will impart many valuable life lessons to Charlie in the forms of rants and hectoring, and Charlie will try to convince Frank that life is worth living even after you lose your sight and alienate your family and friends because honestly, you were an asshole long before you went blind.

It’s kind of monotonous, honestly, even though Brest casts the hell out of the supporting roles: James Rebhorn is Charlie’s perfectly smarmy headmaster, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Charlie’s spineless roommate and June Squibb is there to deliver the big hoo-rah moment. And of course Gabrielle Anwar shows up to dance the tango with Frank, in a scene that Universal very smartly included in the trailer. But there is no reason this film needs to be two hours and thirty-seven minutes long.

At the time, I argued that had Brest cut the first and last reels completely and opened with Charlie picking up Frank and closed with him dropping him off – leaving Charlie’s school trouble unresolved, but knowing he’d do the right thing – Scent of a Woman would be a much stronger picture. But then you’d lose Frank’s big closing speech, which is the thing that almost certainly won Pacino his Oscar, and this movie was made to get Al Pacino an Oscar so that was never going to happen. Anyway, the movie was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, so what do I know.

Shout’s new 4K edition goes back to the original camera negative for a perfect presentation of the film, its autumnal palette faithfully replicated in HDR and Dolby Vision. The added dynamic range really enhances the reds that run through the picture – Charlie’s maroon sweater, Frank’s red scarf and burgundy handkerchief – but never in a way that feels artificial or forced. They’re just a contrast, little spots of life in a graying world. (Audio is offered in 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio.)

The companion Blu-ray offers two extras, both produced by Ballyhoo Motion Pictures: “One Last Tour of the Battlefield: Directing Scent of a Woman,” a 50-minute interview with Brest, and “Just Tango On: Editing Scent of a Woman,” a 20-minute Zoom conversation with Michael Tronick. Brest goes into depth on the development of the script and the care he took in casting, while Tronick talks about the challenge of turning the results into a coherent narrative as one of three editors on the picture.

Watched together, the two pieces give us a very clear sense of what Tronick calls the “maddening, but very rewarding” experience of making this film, as Brest – enabled by the acclaim and success of his previous pictures – shot and shot and shot, leaving his cast and crew exhausted on the day and agonizing over each take in post-production. Which is why a fairly modest picture like Scent of a Woman needed three editors.

So yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of this one. But I know other people love it, and I hope this new release sells well enough to get Shout to tackle Brest’s next picture: Meet Joe Black. That movie’s tragically underrated, and I’d happily listen to Marty talk about it for another hour.

Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising are now available from the Criterion Collection; Withnail is offered in a 4K/Blu-ray combo and a Blu-ray edition, while Advertising is Blu-ray only. Scent of a Woman is available Tuesday in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Shout! Studios.

Up next: At last, it’s Soderbergh week! See you then.