Well!
We went downtown to the fancy Living Room theater where you can get beer and wine and champagne and all kinds of food delivered to you as you recline on a sofa-like seat in a small pleasant screening room. How can the ticket price be the same as a regular film down at the crappy Regal Cinemaplex? And me without my monocle!
We were supposed to see Cave of Forgotten Dudes but at the last minute I changed me mind and decided I wanted to laugh, damnit. So we saw The Trip, starring my secret second husband Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, also a lovely man.
I knew this film would make me laugh with its genteel cleverness and witty banter betwixt two old friends who have been down this long and merry road a thousand times before together. HOWEVER, I did not know the film would also sort of make me cry? Pathos is at the heart of most great comedy, as everyone from Boccaccio to David Brent to GOB Bluth can tell you, but The Trip is even sadder than you expect a funny British film to be (which is pretty sad, lets be honest).
Coogan and Brydon play themselves, or, obviously, sort of caricatured riffs on themselves (one hopes), as they drive around rural England going to fancy restaurants for a food article Coogan has been hired to write. Coogan’s girlfriend was supposed to go with him, but instead they semi-break up and she goes home to America. Many melancholy scenes of failed communication ensue, as Coogan tromps around the cold and misty moors trying to get cell phone reception. He is a sad man, a sad funny man clinging to egomania and self-aggrandizement as the only things keeping him from acknowledging the shrill shrieking void that is his place in the cosmos. In one particularly disturbing scene, he pretends to deliver a speech at Brydon’s funeral which quickly becomes secretly about himself, all about the “marginally amusing one-liners” with which he filled his life as a means of avoiding engagement with reality and other humans. “Jesus Christ,” says Brydon, upset.
There is also an amazing scene where Coogan’s breathtaking view of some limestone cliffs is ruined by an old man who just randomly shows up and starts delivering a lecture about how the limestone was formed millions of years ago.
Amidst all the pathos, the two guys basically just drive around and eat fancy food and trade hilarious monologues and impressions. I never thought impressions were particularly funny before, but I freely admit to laughing until I cried during their Woody Allen bit. There is also a great deal of memorized poetry recitation in the voices of various famous English actors. I particularly like how Brydon announces whose voice he’s doing the poem in, rather than the name of the poet. “SIR IAN MCKELLAN!”
Longtime Coogan buddy Michael Winterbottom is quite a skilled filmmaker, if you ask me, which you didn’t, and he does an amazing job at slowly teasing out the truths of Coogan’s sad life and his friendship with Brydon, instead of revealing it all at once, which would have been ham-fisted and depressing. In fact, you don’t really get hit with the full realization about this dude, this friendship, until the very last scenes of the film, which are just cross-cutting between Brydon’s warm, loving homecoming with his happy wife in their life-filled family home and Coogan’s incredibly sad re-entry into his cold, metallic, empty luxury flat. Oh god! Brydon’s eating spaghetti with his wife and they’re laughing and hugging and talking about how much they hate being apart, and Coogan’s standing at his modernist kitchen counter flipping through a Vogue magazine and it’s like he can BARELY STAND UPRIGHT he’s so filled with sorrow, somehow. It seemed at first like Brydon was the sort of less-famous hanger-on friend who is happy to be Coogan’s fifth choice for the trip, but by the end you see that it was really Brydon doing Coogan the favor all along. It’s a bromance without the romance, really, as Coogan never truly understands what a good friend he has, thus never attains the redemption he wants so badly for himself. The scene where Brydon asks him if he’d give his son appendicitis in exchange for winning an Oscar and Coogan is clearly lying when he says no? Brutal!
It’s really astonishing to see what I assume is two people sort of flaying themselves open and putting their fingers on certain fundamental truths about themselves that are not at all endearing or admirable. Yes, they then caricature those truths, making them more ridiculous than they surely are in real life, but still, the element of truth I sense in their characterizations of themselves is pretty devastating, and makes me think they must both be sort of tremendous human beings, in their way. Is that weird? Is this just what all actors do? But not all actors play themselves in sad little films.
Ben Stiller also has a very funny cameo.
This is my favorite scene:
We were so elated after seeing The Trip that we went home and rented the earlier Winterbottom/Coogan/Brydon collaboration “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” in which Coogan and Brydon also play themselves but to less devastating effect.
I really can not recommend Tristram Shandy highly enough. I literally can’t believe I hadn’t seen it until now–someone has done me a grave wrong by not forcing me to watch it long ago.
T.S. is a bizarre and hilarious novel written in the eighteenth century by Laurence Sterne. Its full title is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” It’s often called the first “modernist” novel because it plays with the structure/concept of the “novel” as a genre. Tristram tries to tell his life story, but gets so caught up in tangents and sidelines that by the end of the book he has not even been born yet. It’s famously considered the most “unfilmable” novel of all time, or something, which is obviously why these dudes decided to make a film of it.
In the film, Michael Winterbottom directs Steve Coogan as he plays Steve Coogan playing Tristram Shandy in a film version of Tristram Shandy made by Michael Winterbottom. Since Tristram never actually ends up being born, Coogan mostly plays his (Tristram’s) father, Walter. Brydon plays Uncle Toby, who is actually the main character of the story but Coogan doesn’t realize it because he’s never read the book, so he keeps arguing for plotlines to be added that he only realizes too late are merely enlarging Brydon’s part while diminishing his own, which enrages him. The film switches frenetically between film and film-within-film, as well as revealing at the end that the entire film AND film-within-film we’ve just watched was all actually a film-within-a-film, with a Steve Coogan played by Steve Coogan, who is in turn arguably being played by the actual living real-life Steve Coogan, who may or may not bear any resemblance to either of his fictional selves.
Basically now I see that Coogan and Brydon are playing the versions of themselves they first explored ten years ago, in Tristram Shandy. Only now they are older and things are sadder for one/happier for the other. WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT IS FANTASY, OH GOD
If anyone knows Steve Coogan please ask him if he wants to move into my house and hang out with me all day long. He probably doesn’t but it doesn’t hurt to ask, GOD DAMN IT.
I love those guys. Both movies are killer.