As you are surely aware, it is the end of the year, which means it is also the end of Finish What You Started, my 2020 bi-monthly series that involved completing movies that I once had to abandon unfinished.
I ended up with two movies in the final month. I'll tell you how that happened in just a minute. But at one point, I wasn't sure if I'd have any.
When I first forecast what I expected to watch in this series, I could think of only five titles. I needed six.
October saved me from that predicament, as I remembered that I'd once started Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a film I happened to have assigned to me in October for a different viewing project altogether. That meant I didn't have to find any more movies for Finish What You Started, and that the final film in the series, Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I (1987), could be my December movie.
Only I combed the various streaming services and iTunes, and I could not find this film. I had never thought of it as particularly hard to come by -- we came by it eight years ago, which is approximately when I started watching it with my wife the first time. But it was nowhere to be found this time.
So then I remembered one more movie I'd started but not finished. (There are certainly others, but the trick is remembering them.) That was Alister Grierson's Sanctum (2011), which I immediately rented from iTunes.
Done and dusted, right?
Not so fast.
Within hours of renting Sanctum I realized there was one more source for Withnail & I that I had not yet consulted. The public libraries have been closed for the majority of the year, it probably goes without saying, but they were even significantly slower to get back up to regular functioning than other local entities, probably because they are not designed to turn a profit or support people's livelihoods. In fact even now, when we are going on two months without a single new case of COVID in the state of Victoria, you are still given the third degree when you enter the library, and the librarians help you with tasks you previously were free to do yourself.
So I hadn't reserved anything from the library all year, but yes, reserving movies is now a thing again. And of course, Withnail & I was available for reserve. Even though I'd already sorted things out with Sanctum, Withnail had been on my original list and I decided just to watch it also. The librarian had to go to the reserve shelf to get it for me rather than letting me walk the ten feet into the library to do it myself, but indeed, I had now sourced Withnail as well.
So you get a bonus movie for this series. Or, I should say, I get a bonus movie, because if I'm being perfectly honest, this series probably has pretty much zero value for you to begin with.
I watched Sanctum first, on the night of December 20th.
It was the completion of a viewing that began almost six years ago, when we were away for the weekend renting a house for my wife's birthday. It was a surprise gathering involving three other families, which wasn't revealed to her until they started showing up. (My wife wondered why we had such a big place just for the four of us.) As we were the first to arrive on Friday night, I started watching Sanctum from the house's DVD collection on its exceptionally large TV. There was a chance the first other family would not arrive until the next day, but when they showed up about 20 minutes into the movie, I had to abandon the viewing. There wasn't a reasonable chance to pick it up again for the rest of the weekend, and I've never gotten back to it.
Although I'd heard not great things about this James Cameron-produced disaster movie, I ended up quite enjoying it. I'm a pretty big fan of disaster movies to begin with, and this was a setting I hadn't really seen before. The characters are spelunking and mapping out a tremendous underground cave with its multiplicity of previously unexplored passageways, most of which require diving gear to properly explore. So as the characters start dying as the result of a surface-level monsoon, the deaths took on a variety of forms related to climbing mishaps and diving mishaps, with headwounds and drownings aplenty. I think the idea behind a disaster movie is to put you in the shoes of the characters and what they're dealing with, and this one does that quite well. I'd heard the acting derided, but I found that for the most part, the actors portrayed their fear and (occasionally) their courage with total credibility.
Probably neither of these viewings -- the one that started in 2015, or the complete viewing now -- were under the ideal conditions to watch Sanctum. Those conditions would have been on an IMAX screen in 3D back in 2011, as Cameron's involvement meant all sorts of technological spectacle that's invariably diminished when you watch it on the small screen. Given that I found it effective even in that forum, I suspect I would have really enjoyed it in a format that accentuates the film's visual strengths.
Unfortunately, Withnail & I -- which I watched last night on Boxing Day -- was a different story.
And this I might have expected given the circumstances of my original failure to finish the movie. That's right, this is the only movie in this series I stopped watching simply because I didn't want to watch it anymore. Saving the worst for last, I guess.
It was sometime late in 2012 or early in 2013, as the second half of that first year and the first half of the second were the only times we lived in the house we bought in Los Angeles just before moving to Australia. (And still own, but have been renting out.) My wife was either the driving force behind the viewing or she co-signed it once she saw I'd acquired it from Netflix, discs through the mail back then. In any case, it had been a favorite of hers that she wanted to show me.
But I just didn't like it.
Considering only the two movies discussed in this post, there could not be a bigger contrast between the visuals of Sanctum and the visuals of Withnail & I. This is a scuzzy looking movie -- by design, I'm sure -- full of scuzzy characters, both scuzzy looking and scuzzy acting. It is no doubt an outgrowth of the kitchen sink movement in British filmmaking of the 1960s, populated by angry young men, albeit in a would-be comedy. And yes, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have anger to spare in the title roles.
If I can be really reductive, here is a quick and easy way to describe the two halves of Withnail & I:
The first half is a portrait of Withnail trying to drink himself to death, a peak he reaches very early on in the narrative when he drinks paint thinner and then asks for his compatriot's toolbox to see if there's an additional supply he's holding back. I suppose the people at the time thought this was funny, but my face did not even crack a smile.
The second half is an extended episode of gay panic. That's right, "I" spends literally the entire second half of this film trying to escape the pursuits of Withnail's randy uncle, who is almost rapey in his enthusiasm. Except instead of being played as comedy -- even this film's dark version of comedy -- the idea of possibly being buggered is treated as a source of serious drama for "I," one the film feels it can keep hitting over and over again without seeming exceedingly homophobic. Of course, 1987 was a different time, and you could get plenty of comedic mileage out of gay panic. If this film were just doing that, it would be okay, but the look on McGann's face is not one of comedic worry -- it's like deep existential dread.
As I said, 1987 was a different time, and it's possible -- though quite unlikely -- that I would have been more favorably disposed toward the movie if I'd seen it then. It has things in common with movies I like, most notably something like Mike Leigh's Naked, which I only just saw for the first time a few years ago. But in 2020, this movie was as much a slog for me as it was in 2012 or 2013. Only this time I could not turn it off.
I did take breaks every half-hour on the half-hour, a task made easier by the fact that I could easily see the readout on our DVD player. And to be fair, it did pick up for me a little in the middle before spiralling downward again. But it's good to know that I wasn't just too tired, or not in the mood, or whatever temporary affliction I thought I might have felt the first time I tried to watch Withnail & I. It's quite clear now that I will never be in the mood for it.
One final note on this film. I have chosen to write the title as Withnail & I rather than Withnail and I, even though it is far more often represented in print with the "and" than the ampersand. I usually go with how the title is actually presented on screen in the movie, but I don't remember that in this case, and I'm not going to put the damn thing back in my DVD player to find out. I do remember, however, that in the credits, Grant is listed as "Withnail" and McGann is listed as "& I," so that's what I'm going with. In fact, that may be the funniest joke in the whole movie.
That's it! That's the series.
I'd offer some kind of recap, but really, these were just six (actually seven) movies that I started once and didn't finish: Sisters, That Sugar Film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Paddington, Dreams, Sanctum and Withnail & I. They didn't have anything else in common with each other, except that they shared a wrong I have now righted.
In 2021, it appears I'm going to be doing something I haven't done before: I'm going to do two bi-monthly series, intertwined with each other. That's in addition to the regular monthly series I will also do. Whereas I usually had January, March, May, July, September and November off from my bi-monthly series, now I'll be watching the second (or is it first?) of the two bi-monthly series those months.
What will they be? You'll have to stay tuned to see.
