In the hilarious new film “The Trip,” which opened yesterday in South Florida, British actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing themselves, tour bucolic countrysides in Northern England, ostensibly to review a series of upscale restaurants for The Observer. The landscapes are stunning – full of the
sort rolling hills, imposing mountain ranges and babbling brooks that would make a horrible movie tolerable – but this is not a film about man’s place in the natural beauty of the world, or even a film about food. It’s a film about people – these two people, specifically – and the way they communicate: the improvised laughs they enjoy, the deep philosophical inquiries they shield with humor, the psychological barriers they insert between themselves.
Whether they are engaging in dueling celebrity impersonations (including dead-on Michael Caines, Woody Allens and Sean Connerys), discussing 19thcentury English poets or singing an ABBA duet, there’s usually a bitter sting of truth behind the casual comedy of their conversations, making “The Trip” much more than the trifling buddy picture it appears to be on the surface.
Coogan and Brydon have worked with “The Trip” director Michael Winterbottom before, in two of my favorite British films of the past 10 years: “24 Hour Party People,” a colorful foray into the brooding Manchester postpunk scene, and “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” a complex movie-within-a-movie “adaptation’ of an unfilmable Irish novel. “The Trip” is closer to the latter in its script, flavor and texture, but it’s even more liberating for Winterbottom’s cast. Coogan and Brydon are not asked to “play” anybody this time, just to be themselves, as in some of the “off-set” moments in “Tristram Shandy.”
But are they really playing themselves, or are they caricatures of themselves? Is Coogan simply playing a character named Steve Coogan? Is the relationship to his American girlfriend really on the rocks, as it is depicted in a few torturous phone-call scenes in the movie? Does he really sleep around with anonymous hotel concierge to numb the pain of not being an A-list actor in prestige pictures? Are those really his parents we meet toward the end of the film? We don’t really know, and it’s one of the film’s fascinating central conceits. Winterbottom is at his best in movies like this (and the others in the unofficial Coogan-Brydon trilogy), when he can operate in this nexus between reality and fiction. The term “docudrama” is used widely, but Winterbottom toils more in docu-comedy. Even if the emotional undercurrent behind every whip-smart joke in the film is fabricated, the illusions are delivered with the sort of searing emotional honesty best reserved for verite dramas or art-house documentaries.
Without spoiling anything, I will simply say that the climax of the movie transcends any punchline, stripping down these men’s facades in an alternately beautiful and heartbreaking way.
“The Trip” is playing now at the Gateway Cinema 4 in Fort Lauderdale and Mos’ Art Theatre in Lake Park. It opens July 22 at Living Room Theaters at Florida Atlantic University in Boca.
