There’s a word in the English language that
I relish. Often, when my husband and I are away somewhere hot, sitting at an
upscale restaurant, one of these beauties will appear on the side of my plate
as a garnish, and I never fail to pick it up, look at him and say, “kumquat” in as clipped a fashion as I
possibly can.
So imagine my delight when, in their latest film, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon turn that word into the funniest back and forth gag since the “Gentlemen, to bed!” fake dialogue they improvised in their first film, The Trip.
Now, in The
Trip to Italy, they’re back, riffing on everything from Alanis Morrisette
to who was more unintelligible in the Batman films: Christian Bale as Bruce
Wayne (not Batman, but Wayne) or Tom Hardy as Bane?
As one account has pointed out, if these
guys were sitting beside you at a table in a restaurant, you’d first poke their
eyes out with a fork before doing yourself in. But onscreen (and edited) they
are wildly funny, if still occasionally annoying. I know Rob Brydon is very
popular in the UK, and the people I went to see it with are big Brydon fans,
but I’m still a Coogan gal myself, and think his comedy is very understated and
hilarious. Brydon is known for his impressions, and he so rarely uses his own
voice that you wonder if he ever forgets who he actually is. And, oddly,
whenever Coogan corrects him and does the impression himself, he almost always
does it better. There were times when Brydon was doing either Sean Connery or
Hugh Grant for the billionth time that the woman behind me in the theatre would
groan, “Oh no...” and I couldn’t blame her. But then he would say something so
off-the-wall hilarious that all is forgiven. And he does pull off an extended
riff on his “man in a box” routine that is so funny I was doubled over
throughout the scene.
As in The
Trip, the two men are sent on a foodie holiday by a newspaper — in the
first film it was to northern England, and in this one it’s Italy — and the
images of the countryside are so gorgeous it’ll take your breath away, and the
food will just make you hungry for the entire film. But the real meat of the
movie is in the conversation between the two men. I can’t imagine how many
hundreds of hours of improv director Michael Winterbottom had to edit to winnow
it down to the 90 minutes of the film, but he must have had a hilariously fun
time doing so.
Yes, they do try to shoehorn in a plot. In
the first film, it was about Steve Coogan having a midlife crisis, trying to
figure out where he is in the world, why he’s not more popular as an actor than
he is, why no one recognizes him on the street, why women no longer look at him
the way they once did, what happened to his marriage, and why his son won’t
speak to him. Brydon, on the other hand, was happily married and had a newborn
baby, and was recognized everywhere they went. In this outing it’s Brydon who’s
unhappy: his wife is so caught up in their three-year-old daughter that she
doesn’t have time for his phone calls, and his mind and eyes begin to stray to
other women. The problem is, if you’ve ever been left at home alone caring for
young children while your spouse travels, you know how exhausting and
time-consuming it is, and that he’s living his life’s dream while his wife
toils away at home with the youngster. So, unfortunately, he was utterly
unsympathetic to me as he worked through his issues, and I thought the subplot
was handled better in The Trip.
That said, I would recommend this to anyone
who loved The Trip (and if you
haven’t seen that movie, do), if for no other reason than to hear them riff on
the word kumquat.
2 comments:
Nice review! If you enjoyed the films, I would also recommend watching the whole series. 6 episodes each, I think.
Thanks for the review, I love it. I love it so much that the greedy gnome in me wants more...
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