The Trip to Spain
You could have convinced me to drive all over England’s North Country with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon; you’d have met zero resistance getting me to join their lively sojourn along Italy’s Western shores. But after seeing The Trip to Spain, you would have had to hold a gun to my head to get me to accompany the pair on their tour of Spain. The duo’s latest road movie is a picture to savor at a distance rather than up close, an exercise in rankling dissatisfaction that you might well feel guilty watching. If The Trip and The Trip to Italy eventually land their leading men in places of warmth, mutual understanding and fellowship, The Trip to Spain takes them to a destination far less certain and more unpleasant, though no less hilarious.
Chafed male relationships are central to The Trip series, of course; Coogan and Brydon have traded barbs over Michelin Star meals on and off since the turn of the decade, each in turn jealous and contemptuous of one another for their successes, whether personal or professional. Conviviality isn’t left off the menu entirely; director Michael Winterbottom just prefers to serve reconciliation somewhere between the halfway mark and the end of these films, using moments of good humor as major turning points in Coogan’s interactions with Brydon. One moment, they communicate chiefly through exasperation. The next, they’re sauntering through Pompei as they quote The Bounty, or gleefully taking the piss out of Art Parkinson and Michael Bublé. It doesn’t take much for Coogan to surrender his self-seriousness to Brydon’s indefatigable charm.
Not quite so in The Trip to Spain. Maybe the problem is the fictionalized Coogan, unable or unwilling to let go of his delusions of grandeur regarding his acting career. Or maybe it’s really Brydon, who no longer feels as obligated to endure Coogan’s prickly self-aggrandizement. Either way, whoever’s to blame, there’s an air of unrest that pervades The Trip to Spain, setting the film apart from its comparatively sunnier predecessors. (Aside: The problem may actually lie with the film’s utterly bananatown ending, though I saw a longer cut of the film at Independent Film Festival Boston, and I’m not sure if that’s the ending Winterbottom kept for The Trip to Spain’s theatrical release.) Coogan is more condescendingly cool than normal, and Brydon’s typical cheer has apparently been deadened in the intervening years since their Italy adventure.
But that’s okay. Time goes on, people get older, their circumstances change, and traditions that begin as harmless larks for which we’re ill-suited become respites from the crushing realities of everyday adult life. That, at least, is what I think Winterbottom means to articulate by opening on a beleaguered Brydon, gratefully accepting Coogan’s taunting invitation to trek over Spain with him, his youngest child squalling in the background. Where the duo’s first two trips were just expense-paid journeys to superb restaurants nestled among peerless destination spots, The Trip to Spain is an escape plan. It doesn’t matter that Coogan and Brydon lack even a shred of requisite experience for writing restaurant reviews or road trip editorials (beyond that which they’ve lucked into acquiring twice before). The driving joke of their previous ventures no longer applies: If this was their first trip, if they’d never been to north England or Italy, they’d be as eager, if not more so, to take on the task.