The Trip is a film adaptation of the eponymous British TV series (they like doing this), and — so long as you aren’t already attached to its largely improvised source material, apparently — it’s a total delight.
It’s a kind of faux-documentary of a week-long foodie jaunt through Northern England. Actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play themselves. When Coogan’s young girlfriend is unable to join him to review restaurants, he conscripts Brydon and off they go in a hired Range Rover.
A film like this is made or broken on charm, and these leads are terrific. They shoot the breeze almost constantly, bounding off down tangential alleys of conversation. They also do celebrity impressions a lot. (Think Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, and Roger Moore, though perhaps a dozen are in the rotation.) You either like this kind of thing or you don’t. I loved it.
As you might expect, beneath the stream of banter the film does wrestle with some slightly more knobbly material, chiefly of the midlife-crisis / am-I-an-empty-person-after-all variety. (Coogan’s the fame-obsessed lothario, whereas Brydon’s happily married with young kids; think The Change Up, but more real and less … emetic.) There’s something to this understory and I’m sure to a certain demographic it rings true, though I’m a little skeptical of any film that tries in essence to reassure average people that their lives in fact trump those of the “successful.” (The Family Man is a prime offender. I enjoy that film, but geez — what a whitewash of middle-income suburbanism.) There’s a fair amount of moor-strolling and only a little navel gazing, and a couple of neat moments where Coogan encounters people behaving to him as he often does to them.
But don’t see this film for its modest story arc. (Coogan isn’t rocked by theophany, doesn’t renounce his ways, or anything else. In the end, he just gazes out the window with something to think about.) No — see it for the wholly engaging experience of driving, eating, and traveling with two rapid-fire, funny, and clever chaps who enjoy a sort of unending conversational reductio. (Remember the opening banter in The Other Guys, about the lion and the tuna? It’s a lot like that.)
Mind you, the Trip is entertaining in other ways as well. There’s a surprising concentration of literary, musical, theatrical, and historical references packed in here — it’s not quite Midnight in Paris, but it’s getting there. As for the food the pair eats (and ostensibly reviews), it’s fairly standard high end molecular gastronomy type stuff, which if you’ve done your time in similar establishments will almost certainly uncork some memories (mostly pleasant, for me). So that’s something.
But in the end, it’s all about the repartee. It’s truly hilarious. And that’s enough.
HAUS VERDICT: The Trip is a splendid little picture — like a road trip with manic old friends. See it.