The comedy Johnny Depp called “as perfect as ‘The Godfather’”
Johnny Depp is no stranger to a tale of chronic excesses. When he starred as Hunter S Thompson in the landmark maelstrom of madness that was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he essentially imparted the yardstick for comic movie madness.
However, 11 years earlier, a British comedy propagated much of the same substance-induced cinematic carnage and became a cult classic that Depp himself describes as being “as perfect as The Godfather”.
Back in 2017, Depp was tasked with curating a selection of films for Glastonbury Festival’s cinema tent. The Pirates of the Caribbean star went for a grab-bag of classics befitting of festivities, albeit, I’m not too sure who wanders around a sunny music festival and thinks, ‘I wouldn’t mind a little trip to a makeshift cinema right now’. However, if any film was fit for such a moment, then it would surely be the iconic Withnail & I.
Speaking about the booze-soaked masterpiece, Depp proclaimed: “No film has ever made me laugh more, or filled me with so much joy… and dread, than Withnail & I! For me, this is perfect cinema. As perfect as Chinatown, as The Godfather, as Time of the Gypsies. Genius”. No doubt he then toasted it with a quick quaff of lighter fluid—or one of the many other improbable beverages Richard E Grant and Paul McGann sample throughout the film.
Beyond the raucous humour, what makes the genius comedy so befitting of Glastonbury and, indeed, the guitar playing Depp’s attention is that the film as a whole has undoubtedly one of the greatest compilations of rock music ever put to film. In part, this is owing to the fact that none other than George Harrison of The Beatles received a producer credit for his role in getting the project off the ground. Along with his classic track ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ are the likes of King Curtis and Jimi Hendrix, who also featured on the soundtrack bolstered by score movements from David Dundas and Rick Wentworth.
For those who haven’t seen it, Withnail and I is a tale of chronic excesses that producer George Harrison would have been more than familiar with. It’s Federico Fellini without all the pretence and metaphors—just working-class folks on one last grand bender and some of the finest songs ever put on a soundtrack. But it’s tastetful, too.
Harrison’s artistic integrity would mean that his song isn’t just dropped in for the hell of it; the cascading melody perfectly matches the sleep-walking decline of the film’s protagonists. There’s no doubt that ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is an artefact of beauty, but it is all the sort of beauty that seems to have been put through a Hunter S Thompson-esque ringer, too, making it ideal for this riotous British comedy.
Since its release in 1987, Withnail & I has been parodied a good few times and has entered the realm of influential cult classic status. However, it didn’t get off to a great start. The first preview screening of the movie was an absolute disaster as seemingly not one single joke coaxed a chuckle from the stone-faced audience, only for a distraught director, Bruce Robinson, to learn later that the entire audience comprised of non-English speaking tourists from the hotel next to the screening venue. They were simply puzzled by the debauchery and unmoved by the drunken pathos.
Luckily, it lived on past this communication breakdown and continues to bring a joyful sense of rock ‘n’ roll to the masses. Much like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas itself, the film does such a good job of capturing the era in which it was set that Paul McGann remarked in 2010 that often people approach him and seemingly think that it was actually made in 1969 after all.
“It comes from the mid-1980s, but it sticks out like a Smiths record. Its provenance is from a different era. None of the production values, none of the iconography, none of the style remotely has it down as an 80s picture,” he said.
It captures the gritty truth of counterculture away from the sunny summer of love in California. With a golden soundtrack, laugh-out-loud mayhem and a disturbing disaster story to ram it all home, it’s not hard to see why Depp described it as being as perfect as The Godfather, sharing its sense of transcendence through the eras. Sometimes comedies deserve an equal share of the limelight for their joy-giving ways, but they rarely do unless a fellow like Depp is around.
