Review: The Trip to Italy
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
City Paper grade: B-
They say travel is the surest way to get to know someone — but how do two wanderers pass the hours once they can read each others’ neuroses like a roadmap? That’s the main problem mucking up Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s second Michael Winterbottom-booked sojourn together, a question of retread that negotiates the tricky line between giving the people what they want and giving them something new.
Just like the initial BBC series that Winterbottom converted to a full theatrical feature, this Trip sees exaggerated versions of Coogan and Brydon on the clock, eating their way through high-end restaurants as research for a piece on regional dining. While the first journey placed them in the misty north of England, this sun-kissed assignment spreads them across Italy’s boot, where they down plates of incredible-looking pasta and lightly trace the movements of the Romantic poets. Bargain-brand Byronic heroes both, the actors’ appetites and insecurities get them into plenty of shit, but there aren’t many characters or devices driving them, or the narrative, in one direction or another.
This laissez-faire approach to storytelling, ballasted by Coogan and Brydon’s impression battles and tedious arguments, is a large part of what made 2011’s Trip so odd and compelling. Coogan, as the mega-jaded thesp frustrated by his lot in Hollywood, and Brydon, as the lower-brow but commercially virile UK small-screener, revealed much of their nature, and the nature of their business, in tête-à-têtes over three square meals. Very little has changed this time around — fine if you’re still hungry for more drawn-out Michael Caine goofs, but redundant if you’re looking for the fellows to play it something other than safe. Their fleeting references to Bryon’s wanderlust-y “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” plus the sophomore-slump “second album syndrome” suffered by musicians, are quite on the nose.
Nearly Seinfeldian in their dedication to minutiae (not to mention their hard-to-buy ability to infiltrate the graces of women far out of their league), Coogan and Brydon’s squabbles, especially when they’re being their half-fictionalized selves, are still tremendously funny. They both possess the ability to turn a silly scrap bilious and cruel with the addition of a single line, and neither misses an opportunity to do so.
