Not all North Americans are on board with the British comedic sensibility, but director Michael Winterbottom has given a gift to those who are.
That gift is Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, two very British comedians, doing very British comedy in the new movie The Trip to Italy.
In the film, Brydon and Coogan play fictionalized versions of themselves, scooped up by the Observer to bomb across the Italian countryside and review fancy restaurants.
But that 鈥減lot鈥� is little more than an excuse to plunk Brydon and Coogan together at a restaurant table and have them compete in a deranged one-up-manship of increasingly absurd celebrity impressions.
Watching the two lob stuffy-nosed Michael Caine impressions back and forth for 10 minutes, while gastronomical creations steam beneath them, is a surreal experience, and often feels more like two friends riffing than a movie, with a plot and character development and, you know, a script.
But there is a bit more to the back-and-forth. It reveals two men struggling with their fears of the emasculating shrivel of old age鈥攂ut doing it with such sarcastic and deadpan Britishness that it鈥檚 hard not to get on board.
This movie is by no means a gut-buster, and you likely won鈥檛 be rolling in the aisles, but Coogan and Brydon have an antagonistic, yet affable, chemistry that鈥檚 hard not to enjoy.
The Trip to Italy is a sequel to The Trip: a movie with the exact same premise, but set in Britain. As with any sequel, it doesn鈥檛 have quite the same crispness, but Coogan is an inexhaustibly deep well of comedy, and more than a few gems bubble to the surface.
Trevor Nichols
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