“The Trip” is a mostly improvised quasi-documentary about two British actors touring northern England, reviewing high-scale restaurants and one-upping each other in their impressions. If you doubt the hilarity in that premise, you can be forgiven, but you’d also be missing out. The humor is as wry and dry as British humor gets, which, I’ll admit, normally doesn’t do much for me. But “The Trip,” which will show at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center beginning Friday, surprises with genuinely big laughs, irresistibly arrogant leads and moments of sharp poignancy against beautiful landscapes.
Steve Coogan is assigned by a London newspaper to review restaurants in the countryside of northern England. Every other friend, including his girlfriend, is busy, so Coogan recruits fellow actor Rob Brydon as a last resort. The pair play fictionalized versions of themselves, but it’s never clear how much is actually fiction, and that’s where the magic lies.
In one scene, Coogan argues with a receptionist about arriving only five minutes past the visitor cutoff. The scuffle only comes to an end when the receptionist recognizes Brydon, who in return does an impression of a character he grew famous for. Coogan’s expression as this is going on is priceless and quite likely a smidgen honest.
While movies like “Coffee and Cigarettes” were interested in the restrained tension when celebrities’ personas clash, Coogan and Brydon don’t hold anything back. They grow increasingly more biting and personal as the days go on.
Who is the more serious actor? Who is the most well-adjusted for their age? Who does the most convincing Michael Caine impression (and best demonstrates the evolution of his nasal timbre)? The banter is so quick and natural that Coogan’s passive-aggressiveness and Brydon’s ostensible nonchalance have to be at least partly based in reality.
Unfortunately, the movie carries on about 20 minutes too long. “The Trip” originally aired as a six-episode series on BBC, before being cut down to a feature film. The television series is probably consistently entertaining in its entirety, but there just isn’t room for so much repetition in the movie format. Every line should add something, and that doesn’t come from just releasing a best-of compilation of scenes.
That said, you get 90 minutes of engaging quality in exchange for that 20 minutes of tedium, so it’s more than worth the trade-off. Even the seemingly unrelatable is made interesting by the energy of the actors. Much of the movie takes place in high-class restaurants, but I’m not a food-aficionado in the slightest. Nor have I read most of the authors the pair quote incessantly. But this backdrop, and the British-isms that I often didn’t pick up, don’t make the slightest difference to viewing enjoyment.
The movie is much more about the universally strange ways we converse and interact. Coogan and Brydon call their significant others multiple times throughout the movie, and the tension that comes through in those calls is a lot like the feeling evoked in “Lost in Translation” — helpless distance and unnatural communication.
When Coogan and Brydon converse with others on their trip, their personalities are the same, but they usually can’t employ the same banter they have together. Their gibing is strangely essential, though impossible to admit. The final scenes, when they return to their separate lives, poignantly highlight these complexities without trying to fabricate a neat conclusion.
It’s this intermittence of big laughs and sharp insights, quick wit and monotony, that never fully satisfies but is also strikingly real. Unless you’ve escaped that reality, this is a movie that’s worth your time.