The Trip | Film review

On the surface, a movie in which two film stars road-trip across the north of England touring the region’s fine-dining establishments portends a new precedent for cine-narcissism, but The Trip goes down easy, mainly because its two leads have such a fluid rapport. Coogan stars as a version of himself, an actor assigned to write a dining piece for the Observer ; with his girlfriend (Stilley) in self-imposed exile in America, he invites his colleague “Rob Brydon” (Brydon, a collaborator on Tristram Shandy), who welcomes the opportunity for a brief respite from family. Sampling different varieties of scallop and engaging in competitive Michael Caine impressions, the two men slowly emerge as Settled and Unsettled, with Brydon’s assuredness acting as a scalpel that lacerates Coogan’s thin skin.

The protean Winterbottom often gets credit just for working in different genres, but he rarely seems totally invested, and here, he can’t quite sustain the invention of the film’s first 90 minutes. (It was edited down from a six-episode BBC series, so perhaps it’s simply better in short bursts.) Still, the late switch to pathos—essentially, an attempt to turn The Trip into Old Joy 2—feels earned, and Brydon and Coogan are a constant delight. If the movie really was partially improvised, as reported, then the line between acting and life has seldom seemed so thin.

'The Trip' movie review: A comedy 'bromance' with adult themes

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the duo from "24 Hour Party People” and “A Cock and Bull Story,” reunite with director Michael Winterbottom in “The Trip” for another ironic look at celebrity and the travails of show business. In the film, which recently screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Coogan and Brydon play loose versions of themselves as not-quite pals taking a road trip through the English lake country for The Observer magazine, eating at award-winning restaurants and perhaps reporting their experiences. When his current girlfriend Mischa (Margo Stilley) bails at the last minute to go to America, and everyone else he asks declines, Steve invites Rob to accompany him. With little hesitation, Rob agrees, and after an affectionate farewell to his wife and baby, they’re off.

Based on the BBC television series of the same name, “The Trip” is an unusual mash up of buddy road picture, travelogue, food porn, and melancholy character study. Steve is the bitter, cynical one who is always bemoaning that all the good parts go to Martin Sheen and Rob is the exhaustingly cheerful one, never tiring of impersonating Michael Caine, Woody Allen, Liam Neeson, and an assortment of others. While Steve depressingly beds women all along the route, some he’s even met before, Rob calls his wife every night before he goes to sleep. It’s the classic Laurel/Hardy, Oscar/Felix twosome, and the two actors are usually entertaining and sometimes hilarious. Like most road trips, you’re tired of the whole thing just a little before it ends.

Improvising dialogue and building on each other’s comic riffs, the two men motor through gorgeous English countryside. They visit Coleridge’s house and recite Wordsworth between stops at the country inns—all with Michelin-starred restaurants—where the magazine has booked them. There’s a fair amount of fun made of the whole food as art thing, and Rob appear s to eat scallops at every meal. Winterbottom pays so much attention to the food—its presentation, its consumption—that one becomes aware of how rarely people eat or cook real meals in American movies, especially those that feature two men. (Snacks that come in plastic bags don’t count.) Maybe it’s not fair to compare “The Trip” to recent American bromance films, but it’s hard not to. Although there’s a lot of drinking, there’s also a lot of talking, and much less vomit and flatulence. For all their kvetching, Steve and Rob are adults, not over-aged teenagers, and their problems are adult ones.

In between meals, Steve spends a lot of time on the phone with his American agent and the absent Mischa, getting the same runaround from both of them. Coogan has a gloomy look to him anyway, and an undercurrent of sadness and middle-aged disappointment runs beneath the gags. He can’t stand the mother of his son, his son isn’t too fond of him, it’s clear that Mischa is over, and then there’s the problem of Martin Sheen. Being a movie star doesn’t seem to be that much fun in “The Trip.”

'The Trip': A Delightful Movie About Nothing

In 2005, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon made a film. In 2011, they take a road trip. I’m referring here not to British actors Coogan and Brydon, who have between them made quite a few films and (one assumes) taken a great many trips. Rather, I refer to the eponymous characters, also actors, played by the duo, first in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and now in The Trip.

In Shandy, Coogan and Brydon dove into a literary wormhole, a scattered and incomplete film-within-a-film based on Sterne’s famously discursive fictional autobiography. At the close of the film—after the ill-timed conception and grotesquely forcepped birth and fenestral circumcision (not presented, of course, in that order)—the two lightly fictionalized performers sit in an empty screening room, shooting the shit: Brydon offers an Al Pacino impression; Coogan critiques it and offers his own; and so on.

The scene is among the best in the movie, so it is perhaps little wonder that Shandy director Michael Winterbottom decided to revisit the Coogan-Brydon dialectic in expanded form. Originally broadcast as a BBC series of six half-hour episodes, The Trip has a conceit so slender that unless viewed from the right angle it vanishes altogether: Coogan, approached by a magazine to spend a week reviewing restaurants in England’s Lake District, accepts the gig because his girlfriend is a foodie. When she decides they need a break from one another and moves back to America, he decides to bring along last-resort, quasi-friend Brydon instead.

Spliced and trimmed into a 107-minute theatrical feature, The Trip retains both its episodic nature and its haphazard charm. There are six chapters, each consisting of a single day in which Coogan and Brydon bicker, joke, and swap impressions in the car as they make their way across the glorious Northern countryside; subsequently, they bicker, joke, and swap impressions some more over a gourmet meal. Throw in a few quick bouts of tourism, and a series of scenes in which Coogan alternates between regretful calls to his girlfriend and liaisons with the hotel staff, and you pretty much have it: a comic diversion that aspires to the old Seinfeld gag of being “about nothing.”

At one early meal, Brydon offers not merely a spot-on impression of Michael Caine, but a series of impressions, cataloguing Sir Michael’s evolution from the cockney aggression of the 1960s to the avuncular gravitas of the present day—only to have Coogan interrupt with his own arguably more expert variation on the theme. (The scene has been YouTubed here.) The movie is full of such inconsequential delights: Coogan and Brydon segueing from Abba’s “The Winner Takes It All” to the Muppet’s Swedish Chef to Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds to Sean Connery; the two men envisioning themselves in a martial costume drama in which the battle-cry “We rise at daybreak” is gradually amended to, well, maybe more like 9:30 or 10ish.

This improvisational tomfoolery is set against the luminous backdrop of the Lake District: the rolling mountains, glistening lakes, and winding roads closely hemmed by rough-hewn stone walls. There are frequent nods to Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were inspired by this landscape, and by whom Coogan and Brydon try very hard to be inspired in turn. (Alas, Beatrix Potter seems to have fallen by the wayside.)

The Trip quietly echoes My Dinner with Andre, not only in its scale and subject matter, but in the relationship between the two men. Coogan, the more famous (he’s best known for his role as Alan Partridge on the BBC), is also the more dissatisfied, attuned to each slight or setback and eager to establish his predominance over his companion at every opportunity. It’s a bargain that Brydon seems content to honor: indeed, contentment seems his lot. Even as Coogan negotiates his way between an ex-wife, a possibly-ex-girlfriend, and a couple of instantly-ex-bedmates, Brydon pines mildly for the domestic compensations of his own wife and baby back in London. Ultimately, The Trip itself offers related compensations—ones devoid of glitz or glamour, alternating between hilarity and languor, and, in their humble fashion, nice to come home to.

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