On Movies: 'The Trip' worth taking, for all involved

NEW YORK - Back in their native United Kingdom,

Rob Brydon

and

Steve Coogan

are celebrities of considerable stature, with several hit TV series between them. When one walks down the street, or into a pub, heads turn, autograph hounds skulk, cellphone cameras click.

Here, it's another story. Brydon, stocky, with a strong jaw and a sonorous voice, is best known as . . . um, for his role as the traffic warden in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels? Coogan, on the other hand, has appeared in the Hollywood hits Tropic Thunder (he's the harried director) and both Night at the Museum films (as Octavius), and actually starred in the not-terribly-successful indie comedy Hamlet II.

The two of them appeared together, too, in Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, but you couldn't fill the Academy of Music with the people who saw that.

The Trip, which brought them to the Tribeca Film Festival last month and opened at the Ritz Five on Friday, might, however, turn this duo into certified stars - cult stars, anyway - on this side of the Atlantic. Think a Hope and Crosby road movie, only with English accents and a nonstop barrage of comic impressions and cinema references, and you have an inkling of what this sublimely funny film is like.

In fact, it was Winterbottom, the prolific director (The Killer Inside Me, A Mighty Heart, 24 Hour Party People), who, watching Brydon and Coogan riff in Tristram Shandy, had the idea to reteam them and see what flew.

In The Trip, Brydon and Coogan play Brydon and Coogan, fellow comedians and not-terribly-good friends who steer a Range Rover through the Lake District, stopping to sup in various posh gourmet spots. They'll take a seat, order some extravagant dishes, and then launch into wild improvisatory put-downs and competitive impression sessions. Brydon will do Michael Caine, say, and then Coogan will critique it and offer his own, and far superior (he believes), Caine interpretation. Then come Richard Burton, Woody Allen, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Roger Moore. There was no shooting script, no plot - just inspired lunacy.

"When Michael was trying to convince us to do this, I thought, well, a whole film with just that kind of stuff?" says Coogan. "I was very reluctant."

"We said no, twice," adds Brydon. "It took three lunches to convince us. . . . We thought, at worst, that it would be a noble failure, because it would be different. It will be brave. It will be experimental. It will be bold."

"We had quite low expectations of it, in some respects," adds Coogan.

The Trip was conceived as both a TV series and a film, and was a huge hit in its initial six-episode BBC release. The film version, which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, has been winning the kind of raves usually reserved for, er, The Tree of Life. (But it's much, much funnier.)

The chemistry between Brydon, the sensible, cheerful one, and Coogan, the narcissist and mope, is brilliant.

"From my perspective," says Brydon, "because I love to improvise, I just thought, well, I'm improvising with the best person to improvise with, doing it under Michael's umbrella, what a lucky guy!"

"That's exactly how I felt," adds Coogan. "I thought, what a lucky guy."

"Yeah, he was aware of how lucky I was at every stage," Brydon says, returning the volley. "I was in awe of Steve."

"And I was in awe of his luckiness," offers Coogan. "What does it feel like to be him, feeling that lucky to be working with me?"

"You almost wish you could be me, to feel that," says Brydon.

"To feel the luck of having to be able to work with me - that's something that I've never experienced." Coogan laments.

And so it goes.

It is suggested that perhaps a kind of avoidance mechanism is at work in the respective psyches of these talented gents. Both have built careers based on comic alter egos (Brydon's Mark Fletcher, a talk-show host, Coogan's Alan Partridge, also a talk-show host), and even in Tristram Shandy and now The Trip, they play exaggerated, meta versions of themselves. Not the real Brydon and Coogan.

"I think that the older you get - I keep coming back to this age thing, because we're at a very interesting age, 45," says Brydon, contemplatively, and somewhat off-point. "So your question is 'Are you avoiding your true self?'

"Maybe a little bit," he confesses.

"It depends on how you want to interpret it," Coogan adds. "You might say, for example, that I'm avoiding dealing with some issues that, although they're exaggerated, might be real in my life. But I would reverse that and say I'm exorcising problems in my life through my work - which sounds much healthier."

With the success of The Trip, doing strong business in New York and Los Angeles and just now spreading out across the land, Winterbottom, Brydon, and Coogan are considering whether The Trip II might be a viable concept.

"The BBC wants to meet us when we go back, to talk about it," Coogan reports. "We're not sure."

"We all want to work together again," says Brydon, "but - "

"We'll do something that's the same, but different," interrupts Coogan. "We don't want to repeat ourselves. Well, we'll repeat ourselves a bit."

"I think part of the success of this is that it's a surprise," notes Brydon, "and to go back into it again with more conversations, more impressions, more driving around, my own feeling is, what would we do?

"Having said that, I felt the same way at the beginning of this, when Michael first proposed the idea. What would we do?"

It is suggested, too, that to bring a different tenor and tone to the sequel, they could refrain from doing any impressions at all, and maybe not even crack wise.

"Yes, something traumatic could happen," says Brydon.

"Well, then it would just become some French film," cautions Coogan. "But without the benefit of subtitles to make it look more profound."