Butler's Cinema Scene

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take "The Trip"

“THE TRIP” My rating: B (Opening Aug.  5 at the Tivoli and Rio)

101 minutes | No MPAA rating

“The Trip” seems a very casual, largely improvised movie — the sort of thing the British refer to as a “toss off.”

Certainly it appears a lightweight affair to bear the name of director Michael Winterbottom, whose output (“Welcome to Sarajevo,” “The Claim,” “24 Hour Party People,” “A Mighty Heart”) trends toward the heavily meaningful.

But don’t let its shaggy-dog demeanor fool you. Despite its simplistic setup, this is one extremely clever and entertaining film. Heck, it even has moments of depth.

“The Trip” is a compressed 90-minute version of a limited series that ran last year on Brit TV. The premise finds comic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon — friends in real life — touring provincial inns and restaurants in the north of England so that Coogan can write a newspaper article about their culinary adventures.

The gimmick here is that the two are portraying themselves. Or rather fictional versions of themselves.

At the film’s outset Coogan’s girlfriend has backed out of the trip, leaving him to scramble for a traveling companion. Old pal Brydon, newly married and with an infant in the house, agrees to come along.

Since theirs is a Mutt & Jeff relationship built on competition, the journey becomes a marathon of one-upmanship, with dinners deteriorating into a furious last-comic-standing rivalry.

Instead of duelling with swords or pistols, Coogan and Brydon’s preferred weapons are  celebrity impersonations: Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Grant, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Sean Connery and especially Michael Caine.

These two have made such a study of Caine that they employ different voices to represent the Cockney actor at various stages of his career.

They are attention whores. Every waitress, hotel receptionist and shopkeeper they encounter is expected to serve as an appreciative audience.

Despite his beautiful girlfriend, the Coogan character is a shameless hound driven to sleep with new women, whether hotel staff members or the pretty photographer the newspaper has sent to snap his portrait (turns out he slept with her years before, but has forgotten).

Brydon is the faithful hubby who misses his wife and baby…but still pumps Coogan for details on his conquests.

Another aspect of their rivalry is that Coogan has forsaken his early TV fame to launch a not-very-successful movie career, while Brydon has remained a familiar face on the tube and thus is now more widely recognized than his ego-driven pal.

There’s really no plot here, just a series of comic episodes interspersed with some truly spectacular footage of the North England countryside (stone walls, sheep-studded pastures) beneath winter skies.

As for the aforementioned depth, it has to do with Coogan’s dawning awareness that he’s burning through his forties with the irresponsible fecklessness of someone half his age. Maybe it’s time to grow up?

For his sake, probably. For ours, let’s hope not.

| Robert W. Butler