The Trip
This fucking guy. Steve Coogan is a real piece of work. He’s unabashedly self-entitled and pompous, and downright hilarious to watch. The Trip is a brilliant film by Michael Winterbottom about a guy named Steve Coogan on a road trip with fellow actor Rob Brydon. They both play themselves, or at least, versions of themselves. Steve plays the egocentric, sullen, self-conscious artist type, struggling, apparently, with romance and career aspirations. Rob is the more contented, settled down of the two, and, were you to ask Steve, the far more obnoxious. They go on a five-day tour of northern England’s upscale restaurants, which was intended as a romantic getaway with Steve’s sort-of-girlfriend, but manifests instead as a difficult excursion of sparring impersonations, pretentious food, fleeting female conquests and, for good measure, introspection, set against picturesque landscapes.
The Trip is dry British comedy. Maybe it’s not for everyone. There’s not too much to the film. Basically: conversations in a Land Rover, pictures of food, phone calls made in natural settings, hotel banter. That’s basically it. But as a character study, it’s very amusing, and a delight to watch the actors engage with one another. It’s photographed well and edited briskly, though because there’s little that can be called “action”, it might feel a tad slow, a bit monotonous. That being said, I challenge anyone to not laugh heartily at scenes regarding the departure time of a medieval army, or the historical and scientific details of natural beauty.
Director Winterbottom includes a somewhat heavy touch on the existential emptiness of Coogan’s life, which I found to be a bit much, particularly since I identified with him strongly. He’s a very particular protagonist: feeling superiority in his distinguished talents (with delusions of grandeur), lustful (partly out of joy, partly out of self-validation), competitive in all things (from having a bigger hotel room to achieving more superficial success), insecure (in age and aging, mediocrity, loneliness). Like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, he seems to vocalize or act out private thoughts usually checked by a societal superego. That the film skewers him incessantly for such qualities is a testament to its dark humor and sharp insight. There is no salvation. Only a stark coda that seems to ask Why? Who knows. Who cares. It’s funny.
