The Trip to Italy

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Italy advances his meditation on the — ostensible — maturing of modern males, begun with his actors/characters Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip (2010). Both films provide the initial charm of putting us in the company of very bright, witty men as they cruise through beautiful landscapes and enjoy gourmet restaurant meals. Despite the air of improvisation, however, these are structured, very serious films. 

Perhaps this one’s key theme is suggested in the recurring references to Fellini’s Le Dolce Vita. The men seem to be living “the sweet life.”   But as the woman photographer reminds us, that film purported to be about the glamour of Rome but was in fact an exposure of the shallowness of its characters. So is this.

As in the first film Rob and Steve seem to live through the films and TV shows they’ve seen. Rob is only authoritative and confident when he does his Michael Parkinson. Otherwise he sinks into Hugh Grant. Their comic strength in variously successful impersonations is actually their weakness as human beings. Their constant flow of impersonations suggests an inability or reluctance to speak as themselves, to reveal anything sincere or meaningful. Their conversations are all technique, no content. It's left to their pregnant assistant to draw life lessons from the movies they cite. In both her critical intelligence and pregnancy she represents a  maturity, fertility and fullness all the men lack. Rob tells her of his infidelity as if he needs her approval or criticism. She won't oblige. 

Moreover, for all the beauty of the settings and the charm of the food they only speak in film references. They seem unable to experience anything directly and intensely. Even Rob’s dream is a replay of the Godfather II revenge assassination. 

They hardly ever talk about their spectacular meals. This is surprising since their commission is to review the restaurants for (cue: another reference to vicarious living) The Observer. Moreover, their entire experience is restricted to luxury hotels and restaurants. That puts them into an impersonation of life. They live in a film and their life experiences are filtered through — i.e., restricted by — their vocabulary of films. Perhaps the petrified Vesuvian figures are their emblem, once living beings now frozen into a box/sculpture/film. 

In a typically resonant scene, when Rob’s wife is too busy to hear his news about his Hollywood film job — a Michael Mann-ly film! — he petulantly retreats into an ever-boyish Dustin Hoffman act. He then implicitly decides to resume his affair with the blonde deckhand. We see the realization of his first night with the woman, but only infer Steve’s resurrection with the photographer. The fling is more meaningful to the adulterous manchild Rob than to the older, divorced Steve.

That contrast runs through the film. Where Steve empathetically wonders about the human behind the petrified corpse, Rob turns it into a foil for a comic routine, using it to score points off Steve. Rob is the more free-wheeling and antic, Steve generally more tense and subdued. The new ending is a marked advance on the first film’s. There Steve returned to his posh, ultra-modern flat and seemed sapped by its vacuity. Here Steve brings over his bored teenage son, spends time with him, then announces he is selling his flat to buy a house near his ex’s, so his son will more easily come visit or even live with him. Steve is growing up.

One reason is both men’s growing sense of their mortality. In the first film they played at roguish blades. Here they’re aware the young beauties don’t see them anymore. Their Batman Caine, Bond and Brando impersonations echo aging, death and decay. Hence their graveyard scenes, especially the tombs of the ex-pat Brits and the long dead Romantics. Special attention is paid the freest-wheeling, Byron, whose near-acronym name is only a taunt to Brydon and his life. There is even an implication of sexual defensiveness and dread in their running line of homosexual jokes. They have no other way to express their mutual affection than by ritual insult.  

     In this series the broadly talented Winterbottom directs two very good actors as men whose media-ted lives have detached them from genuine experience and intimate relationships. As usual, the road trip dramatizes the heroes’ psychological journey. Steve advances; Rob is still running on the spot, though heavier.