Two for the Road: The Trip
By John Semley
Midway through Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, an enticing bit of trivia tumbles out of Rob Brydon’s Welsh mouth: apparently, co-star Steve Coogan (like Brydon, playing “himself”) was in the running for the eponymous role in HBO’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), edged out by Geoffrey Rush. Like plenty of things in The Trip, it’s hard to know how this tidbit relates to reality (though a cursory Google search of “Steve Coogan + Life and Death of Peter Sellers” seems to substantiate it), but the veracity is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is that it’s brought up at all, because even this faint invocation of Stephen Hopkins’ so-so Sellers biopic colours The Trip’s naval-gazing dramedy in ways that needle a little too deliberately. Incidentally or not, Winterbottom’s film suggests a kind of alternate universe which orbits around the sun of its grumbling star: one in which it’s Steve Coogan, not Geoffrey Rush, cashing cheques for Green Lantern and unending Pirates of the Caribbean pictures while basking in the critical acclaim of The King’s Speech (2010). For if The Trip is anything, apart from a magnificently satisfying showcase for Coogan and Brydon’s effortless improvisational interplay (and persistent Michael Caine impressions), it’s a teasingly fluid play between the real-deal Steve Coogan and the alternately charming, dopey, and self-pitying “Steve Coogan” that Winterbottom allows his star to present, riffing on the thin line between Coogan’s on- and off-screen manifestations of comic melancholia and unrestrained egomania. (At one point a dreaming “Steve” is confronted by the newspaper headline “COOGAN IS A CUNT,” continued, below the fold, with “SAYS DAD.”)
