Review by Zach Dennis
A cursory glance at any sort of promotional material for The Trip to Greece (or its three other European-based predecessors) would make you assume that the core of the film is two middle-aged men jousting with celebrity impressions while they wine and the dine the most delectable spots of the Greek world.
You wouldn’t be totally wrong — it is easy to wager that most people have returned four times to the series based more on the dueling Michael Caine or Roger Moore impressions than anything else.
But to relegate The Trip series as just a series of meals and impressions amongst friends (British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing versions of themselves) would be to ignore its actual core — one that is more perceptive and melancholy.
It’s ironic that director Michael Winterbottom most recently teamed with the series’ star, Steve Coogan, on a film titled Greed. This film starred Coogan as an egotistical fashion mogul, who is having to reflect on his life for his ghost writer while also planning a lavish birthday party on Mykonos. The event hovers over the growing refugee crisis nearby, and the two eventual come to a head and Coogan’s character gets his comeuppance.
Greed tries desperately to comment on the vanity and emptiness of the world’s most wealthy, but gets a little too lost in its own mechanics to make a cutting indictment. It’s doubly ironic because Winterbottom, Coogan and Brydon have been able to accomplish this commentary — whether by design or by accident — with their Trip series.
Watching back, the first film in the series, just titled The Trip, is probably the strongest of the four. It isn’t because the others dropped in quality necessarily, but rather the first one felt like it was so unsure of what it should be that it became a bit of a wandering mystery steeped in melancholy. Something felt more genuine from the independent, almost amateur documentarian feel of the film, which generated a more intimate emotion than the three following chapters could muster.
The conceit of two old friends having to travel the great restaurants of the north of England because the one’s girlfriend pulled out at the last minute and no one was able to go along was just enough to vault the characters into the template the series would follow for its three movies afterwards. In The Trip, we are introduced to Coogan’s achievement-base narcissism. The comedian, who in both the reality of the movie and in real life had attained an abundance of attention for his work as Alan Partridge, consistently uses this perceived higher celebrity status to laud over Brydon.
Brydon, who is better known at this point for his impressions on British radio game shows and his traveling one-man show, usually takes the punches but does attempt to thwart Coogan’s massive ego by relegating all of his work down to the buffoonery of his Alan Partridge character rather than the more esteemed or prestigious work the actor longs for.
This back-and-forth finds its way into every other film as Coogan always feels under-appreciated or undervalued while Brydon seems to stumble into opportunities with (in Coogan’s opinion) lesser talent. In The Trip to Italy, Brydon auditions, and is awarded, a prominent role in a Michael Mann gangster film, and in The Trip to Spain, he begins to garner the attention of Coogan’s former American agent who wants to bring Brydon and his comedy stateside.
For Coogan, he seems to constantly be swimming against the stream, and, in his opinion, not garnering the recognition he deserves. The Trip to Spain is the first in the series following the success of Philomena (which included a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Coogan’s writing work). A lot of the internal strife is generated from viewing Brydon as a complete clown in his work while Coogan has the range to nail roles like Alan Partridge, but should also be wowing audiences on the West End.
Most of the time, Brydon understands what mentioning these opportunities to Coogan would mean and leaves it alone. This lack of transparency feeds into many frustrating moments over the course of the series’ four films as neither man can muster the courage to truly connect with one another. In one moment late in The Trip to Spain, Coogan remarks to his assistant Emma and their photographer Yolanda that Brydon is unable to face reality without the help of an impression (at the same time, Brydon continues to be locked into a Roger Moore impression that has gnawed at Coogan’s nerves through the conversation). Brydon admitted as much to Emma in The Trip to Italy when he divulges a few details of his brief affair with a woman they met while sailing, which he does with the aid of Hugh Grant’s inflection.
Coogan doesn’t have much room to talk. Rather than addressing issues, he seems to internalize and bottle everything. His insecurities and neurosis manifest into dream sequences in both The Trip to Spain and The Trip to Greece — the former in the form of an exaggerated melodrama while the latter seems more artfully minded as a prophetic vision of sorts.
This is where the Alan Partridge and Philomena star seems to take over as the “lead” character between two men as Coogan is usually left without any glimmer of catharsis or a straight course at the end of each movie, opening up room to once again go searching in another edition. In the first film, we’re left with Coogan in a dark, rainy London apartment alone and unsure of what the next step in his career will look like. He seems a bit more rounded and structured in Italy as a late visit from his son allows him the opportunity to play dad for the first time in what seems like awhile. In Spain, he stays behind to work on the book he hasn’t started yet but has waxed on about multiple times through the film and is left in a confusing sequence that hints at his abduction, but is only referenced once early on in Greece and is immediately put to bed.
In Greece, we actually are left with Coogan having to do the most heavy lifting out of anyone in the entire series as his character’s father dies and he is left to rush back home to Manchester. His fear of aging and being viewed as “too old” throughout the entire series comes to a head as he has to face the death of his father, returning home to see his son and his ex-wife and figuring out what the road for his professional life will be as the Philomena and Stan & Ollie bump didn’t lift him off as much as he would’ve hoped.
This resistance to face the realities of life usually come to face for Coogan rather than Brydon as his “quirks” or personality traits lend more to feeding his insecurity rather than finding a full picture of who this Steve Coogan really is. Throughout the series, Coogan loves to wax about the history of the location or bring to mind a piece of literature referencing the spot that they’re in — an effort to display his superior knowledge not only to Brydon, but anyone else who has the willingness to listen to his lectures. He takes the same approach with physical health and his appearance, but is humbled in a swimming race with Brydon in Greece — an event that leads to one of his visions along with an early morning swim to better understand why he lost.
Brydon is always left back home with his family. It’s interesting to watch his progression through the series as outside of the brief affair in Italy, there isn’t much for Brydon to actually reckon with outside of the burgeoning opportunities and the relatively pedestrian trials of becoming a father and being middle-aged. In the first, third and fourth films, he is shown to have a bit hectic, but overall loving, family life and the cold spot between he and his wife that seems to have catalyst the affair in Italy was based on his own insecurities following the birth of his daughter and what his life and partner became after that.
The only other strong indicator of Brydon’s insecurity stems from Coogan’s comment about his impressions, which as stated before, continuously becomes a crutch Brydon leans on to make a point, outperform Coogan or just get on his nerves.
The Trip series doesn’t have the stark contrast that Greed , but instead, engages with how many of the issues facing its two main characters are supremely first-world problems, and a lot of the insecurities could be put to rest with an open line of communication — something neither man can offer due to insecurity, jealousy and lacking the basic courage to even try.
In that way, it becomes much sadder. The real core of the movie isn’t the food, locations or impressions at all. Rather, it is that all of the money in the world can reward you with all-expense paid food tours of northern England, Italy, Spain and Greece — complete with various sexual escapades with beautiful women, astounding car rides through the countryside and lavish hotel accommodations — but those trips won’t offer the happiness and catharsis they seek as overwhelming wealth has diminishing returns.
Each man is provided with life-altering trips and experiences, but continue to spend the bulk of the time unable to communicate with their decades-long companion or actually enjoy their surroundings. It’s difficult to feel much sympathy for these two wildly successful comedians (or at least their alter-egos), but there is a lot of truth in the insecurity evident between the two men.
Why else would every trip end with one of the men staring blankly into the distance in silence?