OneLuLu

Okay, we've got the cad, we've got the babe...er, babes...and a good deal of summary regarding each character's various skills and hang-ups, socially and in bed...

But we have an ersatz Woody with really bad timing and no funny gestures, and no wide-eyed chick who just wants to LEARN Woody Allen esthetics!

Woody Allen's movies have been suffering for quite a while from a sort of emotional inertia, moving always in the same direction, but getting more and more frantic and overstated. Lately I've seen no reason to pay attention -- but I have anyway. Why? Because Woody Allen, himself, is FUNNY.

He is, in fact, the best thing left in his movies; and now he's not there at all. What does that tell you?

The message is just part of the medium: and I'm very glad Stoppard realized that when he morphed his play into a movie. Wit and literary playfulness are enough to make a stage play entertianing, but a movie carries greater visual expectations and Stoppard obliged.

Horse rides through bleak countryside, flashbacks to shards of half-written memories, and a startlingly witty and ironic depiction of bare-bones stage props make this movie a real movie, and not just a big-screen play production.

There's a lot of impressive wit in Rosencrantz that depends ENTIRELY upon an intimacy with Shakespeare's Hamlet (scenes which augment Shakespeare's by presenting the back-stage drama which R&G occupy make for at least half of the biggest guffaws), so this movie is not going to wow everyone despite it's playfulness.

There are many movies with sympathetic villains, lots of character studies that show us the desires of the perverted or the hearts of the bigoted; this movie is like none of them.

And yet both of its main characters are homophobes. Both "& I" and Withnail, charming, playful, and disarmingly articulate, are in denial about Withnail's homosexuality.

Withnail & I is a story of unrequited love between two down-and-out actors at the tail end of the free-love era. The denial of Withnail's sexuality is a running joke; but it runs UNDER the story. The pair accidentally trap themselves in a rustic cabin and thier growing anxiety mirrors and merges with the impending , seemingly inevitable confession of Whithnail's feelings for &I. When this is compounded by the sneaky arrival of Whithnail's flaming and lecherous uncle, the situation grows funnier and more tortuous.

Laughter mounts until the sad and deeply ironic ending wherein Withnail is left alone in the rain reciting Hamlet's soliloquy. The final attempt to hand us the theme: Withnail deftly adds back the line which follows, "Man delights not me," usually excluded from recitations: "No, nor woman neither."