Sweetest Songs, Saddest Thoughts

Brydon and Coogan peruse the stones in The Trip to Italy.

««« The Trip to Italy.  Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. At selected theaters.

If paradise is a place where all the cooks are Italian and all the comics are British, then The Trip to Italy, Michael Winterbottom's sequel to his 2010 road comedy The Trip, is a slice of Heaven.

          It wouldn't have taken much for this writer to sign on for another culinary tour. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play characters named "Steve Coogan" and "Bob Brydon" extremely well—arguably better than anyone else could. Like on road trips taken by you and me, their by-play is a salad of idle gossip, in-jokes, movie quotes and impersonations, including a bout of "dueling Michael Caines" that, even in rehash, is bloody hilarious. Like the original, the sequel has been assembled out of episodes of the BBC's The Trip TV-series. Though director Michael Winterbottom is given script credit, much of the dialog feels (as in The Trip) deftly improvised.

          The new movie finds Coogan and Brydon going in different directions professionally. Coogan (who co-wrote and starred in the hit Philomena) has achieved serious success in America, but faces a stretch of unemployment after his TV series is cancelled. Brydon, as a somewhat better-read Rich Little, is less known but on the upswing after landing a part in a Michael Mann film. In a late summer with a decidedly "mid-life" feel to it, Coogan joins Brydon on a tour of restaurants in Italy that will (he claims) end up anthologized in a book.

          The food is, of course, only a pretext; neither Coogan nor Brydon even bother to take notes on what they've eaten, or ever so much as chat up a chef. Their real passion is literature—specifically, the Romantic poets, whom they argue over and quote as vigorously as Al Pacino movies or the music of Alanis Morrisette. Alas, these guys are more bitch-and-moan than sturm und drang. When they board a rubber dinghy to begin their tour of the Gulf of Spezia (where Percy Shelley drowned), they worry, "This isn't the actual boat, is it?"

          Much as they seem to circling around the same three subjects of poetry, women, and career, these lads have clearly gone some distance since their last trip. Last time both were hungry most of all for mainstream success. Now that Coogan's ship as come in, and Brydon's is about to, there's a whiff of letdown in the air, of questioning whether "making it" in Hollywood has landed them in a good place after all.

          There's much chatter on the web that the inevitable next chapter will be a Trip to America. But that would almost be redundant. America—and the values it represents abroad—already looms large over these movies. The poets Coogan and Brydon idolize are more than sources of fancy verse to recite and impress the chicks. The dejected Keats had a lovely, wind-swept gulf to drown in. We have an ocean of cultural mediocrity.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro