And what if the script was mostly improvised, with the actors playing off against each other, drawing from their friendly rivalry on-screen and off-screen? That’s the kind of juicily self-referential acting-within-acting movie concept film aficionados dream about — a concept that mostly stays in their heads, instead of actually becoming a film. Unless, of course, there is a director like Michael Winterbottom, who can see why a movie like this might be marvellous fun, and gets it made. And that’s what The Trip is, a new British movie about two celebrity character actors, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who are commissioned by the Observer to travel through England’s Lake District sampling gourmet restaurants and writing celebrity food reviews.
Forget the food and the road trip — two overdone movie concepts — focus on the dueling impersonations, the witty banter, and the painfully honest self disclosures that lay bare an actor’s ego, and you have a terrific film here that pays tribute to actors and acting. Some have called it the movie companion to The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But hey no, The Trip is something entirely new. Something filmmaker Winterbottom has been developing through his career. It is a genre —movie within a movie — he’s bending into acting-within-acting. The soul of The Trip is the dueling impersonations. Driving a Range Rover, stopping at posh restaurants, Coogan and Brydon trade impersonations of Michael Caine. And the one-upmanship to get the perfect Michael Caine voice register and accent gets intense.
Brydon says Coogan can only do the classic Caine voice, the nasal cockney we know well, but what about Caine as he speaks now — in movies like Flawless and Harry Brown? It’s a little deeper and slower. Later, Coogan dismisses the contemporary Caine impersonation as too easy and challenges Brydon with the very early Caine, the Caine of The Ipcress File and Blame it on Rio (or maybe it is Brydon challenging Coogan, you stop telling). In between, they impersonate De Niro, Pacino, Connery, Woody Allen and Anthony Hopkins. Especially hilarious is their varying impersonation of that icy-cool line delivered by Christopher Lee as the Bond villain, Scaramanga, from The Man with the Golden Gun — ‘come, come, Mr Bond, you enjoy killing as much as I do.’ One of them says ‘come, come, Mr Bond’ quickly and casually for ruthlessness while the other ‘come, come Mr Bond’, is drawn out heavily for irony.
On the way to these upscale restaurants, they stop to visit the houses of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and walk through the Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights, unable to stop themselves from talking about Roger Moore and other people named Moore. That’s the kind of non-sequiturs they often lapse into, and from your own experience of similar road trips, you know that this kind of nonsensical exchange comes from being a little bored and restless with constant travel and chattering companions. You can watch the best clips of The Trip on YouTube, since it was originally a six-part series on BBC2. You can even view some scenes that didn’t make the movie cut, like Coogan doing Richard Gere.
But just who are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon? They are adored in Britain (and now popular in the US) for the stellar comic work they’ve done on British television. And more recently, their brilliant work in films. One of them, A Cock and Bull Story, a dazzling take on Tristram Shandy, happens to be made by my favourite contemporary filmmaker, Michael Winterbottom. We caught flashes of how Brydon and Coogan work together as a team in Tristram Shandy, where they also played themselves, in addition to Coogan playing an egotistical actor wanting to best his co-star, Brydon.
The inspiration to make The Trip must have emerged from what the comic duo did on and off-screen with their roles here. Coogan’s love life is shaky, he’s worried that his career isn’t taking off, and now he’s stuck with Brydon for a travel companion, who seems better at impersonations. Brydon appears secure, un-edgy, embraced by the warmth of his family. Coogan is divorced, has a son he doesn’t see often enough, and lives alone in a posh London flat that is all chrome and glass. They are playing exaggerated versions of themselves. And yet it requires guts to let all that hang out — your insecurity, envy, competitiveness, loneliness, and the hunger for fame.
Something like The Trip is so tricky to write and make. Obviously, it is a script they are playing out, and it is partly fiction, but they are also playing it really close to who they could become. Since it is improvised, they are drawing from material that is as intimate as self knowledge and what they know about their colleagues, their profession and their friends. Winterbottom knows how to make a snappy, funny, truthful and melancholic movie out of such undramatic, autobiographical material. I’ve followed his work with pleasure as he moves from one new subject to another, using his naturalistic style of filmmaking.
It is my belief that Winterbottom can do anything and he can do it with economy, intimacy, authenticity and still give you a feeling that you’ve just watched a blockbuster, not a small budget, art house film. In India, the movie he is best known for is A Mighty Heart, and perhaps, The Road to Guantanamo. To film buffs, he’s the director of 24 Hour Party People, Into This World, Code 46, and the recent, Genoa. The only film of his I didn’t like is The Killer Inside Me. His next project, Trishna, an Indianised version of Thomas Hardy’s book, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, with Frieda Pinto, has just finished filming in Mumbai and Jaipur.
Coming back to the good bits — another piece of classic recurring movie dialogue that gets the Coogan-Brydon roasting is that line from old action movies. Coogan, driving behind the wheel, says to Brydon, “Have you noticed how they are always saying in these movies, ‘Gentleman to bed, for we leave at first light’, or ‘Gentleman to bed, for we rise at daybreak’ or ‘Gentleman to bed, for tomorrow we do battle.’ It’s always at daybreak, they never leave it at something like, ‘Gentleman to bed, for we leave at…nine thirty!’” Brydon picks up on this and says, “Gentleman to bed for we leave at nine thirty-ish.” They continue riffing the line, until they begin mangling it with absurd variations that don’t even make sense, but which has them (and us) rolling with laugher. More than any recent movie I can recall, The Trip makes us aware of the pleasures, silliness and complexities of acting as it gleefully and expertly celebrates the craft.