'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.”