The Trip to Italy Review

Like one of the summer's other great comedies, 22 Jump Street, Michael Winterbottom's The Trip to Italy pokes fun at its status as a sequel.  Once again, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play fictionalized versions of themselves tasked with traveling around to distinguished restaurants, this time in beautiful Italy.  An early conversation about The Dark Knight Rises leads them to discuss how sequels are never as good as their predecessors (save The Godfather Part II, of course), and how strange it feels to do something a second time.  Indeed, The Trip to Italy doesn't veer far off the path forged by its predecessor - the more simply titled The Trip - but when the company is so good and the banter so brilliant, it's a joyous reunion.

If one comes back for this second course simply for the comedy, full satisfaction will be found.  Coogan and Brydon retain their wonderful chemistry, whether engaging in impression competitions or play-acting absurd scenes.  How much is improvised, I don't know, but it's a testament to the actors' comedic timing, and to Winterbottom's luxurious direction, that the film often feels like a documentary, and we're watching the actual men engage in these conversations, and eat this glorious food.  As in The Trip, Coogan is often the straight man (or at least the straighter of the two), but his deadpan control is crucial to Brydon's more energetic brand of humor.  It's sometimes hard to keep up, so fast do the quips come, one after the other, which surely makes this trip one worth taking more than once.

Beyond the jokes, though, and after the meals have finished, The Trip to Italy has much on its mind.  The film isn't only intelligent in its comedy, but also in its thematic rumination.  Many of the vistas - gorgeous on their own, but even more picturesque thanks to James Clark's sumptuous camerawork - are serene to the point of forcing contemplation, and though Steve and Rob spend much of their journey joking about, they, too, are troubled by bouts of darkness.  Though they have a lovely connection to each other, it usually exists at the surface, with each retiring to his own room at each day's end to mull and ponder.  Neither is particularly connected to their loved ones.  Steve lives in LA and can barely catch his son on Skype.  Rob's wife is too busy to talk whenever he calls.  Here are two men searching for, and mostly failing to find, connection.

Which surely must disappoint them, as they walk in the footsteps of great celebrities who have come before, and visit the locales that have populated some of the all-time great films.  Steve, in particular, spends much of his time thinking on celebrity, wondering if anyone will remember him when he is dead and gone.  With his recent show not picked up for series, and many of his film roles failing to find a wide audience, he worries that he - like the petrified bodies at Pompeii - may be mourned by no one, and that his name may be forgotten in the centuries to come.  The worry can only be intensified while staying in rooms and walking down streets that were visited, in older, golden years, by the likes of Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart.

There's an air of melancholy, too, lent by the great films that have been filmed in these locations before.  The characters note filming locations from Roman Holiday and Journey to Italy, and Steve is particularly infatuated with La Dolce Vita, while Rob wants to visit Sicily, home of The Godfather.  Worn into the fabric of the world are the imprints of the fictionalized realms it once played host to; Italy - though many have never visited - is not alien to anyone who has seen these films.  To see these places in real life could bring along a bout of Gatsby syndrome, with the cracks and imperfections of the real world ruining the magic we seek when we follow the long-gone paths of those we admire and mythologize.  So a culinary trek through beautiful countryside and across a gorgeous sea may be Byronic or otherworldly in most films; but not so here.  Winterbottom instead employs the shells of these celluloid memories to encase Steve and Rob's introspective, often gloomy, journey to being better men, or at least different men.   That they're eating great food along the way doesn't make the going any less painful; it only provides brief moments of rapturous respite.