The Trip to Italy: touring the male psyche with Coogan and Brydon
Like the perfectly cooked hard-boiled egg, the precise definition of pornography and the evergreen appeal of “Weird Al” Yankovic, male friendship is one of those things that’s easy to understand but impossible to explain. Its rough territorial borders are professional jealousy, sexual envy, pecuniary scorekeeping and compulsive mockery. That makes it an awkward place to dwell but an amusing place to visit — except when the men are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, herded into their pen by director Michael Winterbottom, when it’s a richly funny, curiously affecting country of its own.
Winterbottom first brought together these auto-caricaturing, “as themselves” versions of Coogan and Brydon in 2005’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a highly rewatchable sendup of conventional moviemaking and the egos it both enables and requires. The Trip, four years ago, sent Coogan and Brydon (with Winterbottom behind the camera, guiding their improvised dialogue) around northern England to sample rich food and sleep in quaintly luxurious inns. The stated (fictional) goal was a frothy series of lifestyle pieces for a newspaper. Instead, Brydon and Coogan prodded each other with dueling Michael Caine impressions and well-placed jabs at each other’s places in the entertainment industry. They rarely seemed to like each other, but they weren’t in much hurry to get back, either. (Coogan’s scene alone at the end is as melancholy as the rest of the movie is amusing.)
Now comes The Trip to Italy, Winterbottom’s self-explanatory sequel, with heavier food, heartier laughs and (slightly) headier themes. Again, there’s not much to it, just a drive from Piemonte to Capri, by way of the Amalfi Coast, with stops to think Percy Shelley and Lord Byron thoughts in Liguria, imagine how they’d have fared in Pompeii, and admire locations familiar to fans of Beat the Devil and Roman Holiday and Contempt. Mortality is considered, celebrity impressions refined.
It’s a funnier, prettier movie than the first Trip, though no more approachable — and that’s good. There are doubtless many on whom the charms of the comically abrasive are lost, and Coogan and Brydon are equally willing to make their Trip personas unflattering. Without the manufactured tension between them, though, the authentic laughter that the two share during the film’s best scene would mean less. It’s a lunch that occurs late in the movie, a stop in Ravello during which the wine — real in every scene — is a bit more plentiful. Their characters are in Italy for the beauty and the cuisine, but the actors at the table — the men — are enjoying a taste of that bittersweet thing that’s more than camaraderie and less than love.
