* * * (out of five) The Trip. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.
Michael Winterbottom's The Trip is about two mismatched actors who spend a week together touring posh restaurants in England—and I liked it. I also liked it seven years ago, when it was called Sideways and starred Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church as a pair of mismatched college chums touring California wine country. When it comes to certain fondly remembered cinematic meals, déjà vu isn’t necessarily a problem, is it?
The Trip is also reminiscent of My Dinner with Andre (1981), still the touchstone of feature-length food-for-thought movies. But unlike the scripted Andre or Sideways, The Trip depends entirely on witty, wholly improvised by-play between its stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Insofar as it neither gives nor needs anything to fall back on beyond the appeal of its players, it’s perhaps the bravest of the three. Add the fact that Coogan and Brydon are actors playing versions of themselves—and that actors can be the most tiresomely self-absorbed of human beings—and the success of The Trip was never guaranteed.
Coogan, who is hardly known over here for small roles in Tropic Thunder, The Other Guys, and Marmaduke, plays Steve Coogan, a barely-known actor who yearns for mainstream Hollywood success. While he awaits his big break, he takes a magazine assignment to tour the culinary landmarks of northern England. He asks Brydon, a veritable juke-box of cartoonish impressions, to tag along, but only because his much-younger, much-foodier girlfriend (Margo Stilley) can’t go. This leaves two guys on the road together, in cozy hotel rooms, facing incomprehensible dishes like “millet pudding with spelt and Blackstick blue, burnt pear and alexanders” or an amuse-bouche that is tasty, but with “the consistency of Ray Winstone’s snot.”
Together, these two blokes aren’t exactly like oil and water. They’re more like two slightly different grades of oil, alike in some ways, but just different enough not to mix. Watching them try to top each other in the things that matter most to underemployed British thespians, such as producing the most spot-on Michael Caine impression, or delivering choice lines from Goldfinger, is never less than hilarious. Indeed, their skill at dressing their deep juvenility in choice bon mots, classed up with epigrams by Coleridge and Wordsworth, suggests a particularly literate episode of Top Gear—except with snotty food instead of Ferraris.
I liked it, but my admiration has its limits. Sideways has a similar premise, but the guys there show their characters as much through doing things as through yammering about doing things. By the end, they arrive someplace, and they learn something. The Trip, by contrast, has an episodic feel, no doubt stemming from the fact that the film has been compiled from the ongoing BBC TV series. Yet for all its meandering, it’s also something of a still life, with “Coogan” and “Brydon” each stuck in their respective traps, unable to escape no matter how many miles they go.
This, I suppose, is one reason why the road movie has such powerful resonance for Americans, but not so much in Europe. Here, we still believe the highway goes someplace new, as different as Los Angeles is from Philadelphia or New York. Over there, the road just goes outward, dwindling into rustic country lanes that promise nothing more than to bog us down in more details, more particulars. By the end of this trip, the characters can only head home to the ruts from whence they began.
At least these sorry buggers get a free lunch out of it.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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