LITTLE ROCK — In contrast to Roger Corman’s 1967 freakout, The Trip, no hallucinogens are harmed in the Michael Winterbottom comedy of the same title, a British road movie laced with lacerating laughs and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
Coogan does, in fact, smoke a joint, lighting up in the same house where Coleridge wrote “Dejection: An Ode” and indulged in opium, the soporific that enslaved him in “humiliation and debasement.” Coogan has made a career partly by riffing on narcissism, and he’s in fine self-loving form, as is Brydon. For one man, the humiliation of choice here is fame (with a debasement chaser), while for the other it’s his incessant vocalmugging. Both give you a contact high.
The duo’s dueling funnymen routine will be familiar if you’ve seen a few of Winterbottom’s earlier films, including Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, or were in Britain last fall and caught The Trip when it was a sixpart BBC2 television series. The title, premise and almost everything else in the big- and small-screen versions are identical because, well, they’re essentially the same, save for the movie’s abbreviated length (111 minutes) and some gags lost in translation.
To rewind: Coogan accepts a gig from The Observer of London to review six restaurants in northern England. He plans to take his (pretend) girlfriend, Mischa (Margo Stilley), but is forced, with demonstrable reluctance, to ask Brydon instead. Straightaway, the two friendly combatants are motoring out of London in a Range Rover, maps and gags at the ready.
As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery). They also eat, of course, often and well, dining in restaurants where the rooms and service are hushed and the dishes extravagantly conceptualized and prepared. (With The Observer paying, money isn’t an issue.) There are gardens of vegetables, oceans of seafood, a veritable abattoir of meat. At the Cumbrian restaurant L’Enclume (one Michelin star), the near-parodic haute and low offerings include lollipops “made out of duck fat with peanuts.”
In between the truffle ravioli and Burgundy, the vocal caricatures and Lake District landscapes, Coogan and Brydon goad each other with prickly jokes and smiled insults all while comparing their successes, reciting poetry and walking the moors, as well as an occasional tightrope. Sometimes the camaraderie edges into aggression that is soon snuffed out with laughter. Coogan’s stated desire to act for filmart “auteurs” is one wellchewed bone they tug at, as is Brydon’s populist appeal.
Since they worked with Winterbottom in his 2002 film 24 Hour Party People, Brydon has continued to blow up bigger in Britain, while Coogan’s Hollywood future has dimmed (his starturn in Around the World in 80 Days went nowhere), developments that give The Trip a sting of truth.
Oh, how Coogan aches for celebrity. Or at least that’s what his on-screen character yearns for. It’s unclear which is which, who is who, and that’s part of the journey - the destination too. To the extent that the man at the wheel (Coogan) and the guy riding shotgun (Brydon) are playacting is a question that Winterbottom and his stars enjoyably bat around. Does it matter where a performer ends and the persona begins, or whether the two can be separated? In The Trip you search for authenticity among the jokes and lulls, but what you get is what you see and hear: Coogan sniping, eating and whining, endlessly whining, about the size of his rooms, the state of his career, and Brydon a blissful foil. It’s plenty real.
Even so, it’s impossible to know whether Coogan is honestly wounded and whether Brydon is as cheerfully impervious to insult as he appears. It’s easier to guess: maybe so. In one scene Coogan tries to mimic Brydon’s popular “small man in a box” voice and its tiny peeping, but fails. Looking into a mirror, Coogan says with strangled effort - addressing his twin self, the one perhaps responsible for great Coogan creations like Alan Partridge - “I don’t care about silly voices.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of the contradictions and sad-funny neediness that The Trip gets at so well, and a moment that Winterbottom almost blows with the tinkling piano that creeps onto the soundtrack whenever things turn selfconsciously serious. There’s no need to milk the tears when, like the laughs, they’re already flowing.
The Trip 89 Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon Director: Michael Winterbottom Rating: Not rated Running time: 111 minutes
MovieStyle, Pages 38 on 08/12/2011