Do you have friends who never shut up? They’re always on, always crazy and frenetic, but uproariously funny at the same time, so you’re inevitably ROTFLMAO. But at the end of your time together, you’re exhausted because there’s no off-switch, no timeout, no breathing space, no mute. That’s the essence of this movie. These guys made me laugh for almost two hours, for they are indeed funny, hysterically so at times — clever, witty, literate, ironic, acerbic, droll. However, you keep straining to hear and process it all, afraid to miss anything, so you finish the movie deprived of all strength and drained of all vitality. How to go on?
First England, then Italy. This time, Spain. No, this isn't a series of Bing Crosby/Bob Hope on-the-road movies as they flit from here to there. The bromancing couple are actors Rob Brydon/Steve Coogan, playing characters Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, with assorted other cast members playing their fictional families and friends. It’s a meta-melange that worked beautifully in their earlier road pictures, also directed by Michael Winterbottom: The Trip (2011), where they traveled England’s Lake District, then The Trip to Italy (2014), exploring that country from Piedmont to Capri. Now comes The Trip to Spain, from Santander in the north to Malaga in the south, with gorgeous aerial photography and National Geographic-worthy treatment of the Iberian peninsula, plus beautiful, sizzling food-porn close-ups of all manner of Spanish delectables, compliments of cinematographer James Clark.
I suppose it’s worse if a comedy is not funny at all, but when a comedy is nonstop gags, jokes, celebrity impressions, cruel imitations and earworm singalongs, with just an occasional nod to real-world banality and tourist-postcard views, then your fingers itch for a remote control so you can slow it down and absorb everything. My fingers itched a lot.
Though the original film was to be a one-off, clearly there was enough crazy humor and gustatory delight to warrant a second country, and then a third. A Google search reveals there are 195 countries in the world today — 193 members of the United Nations and two non-member countries, the Holy See and the State of Palestine. Next up, perhaps, a wild and wacky laughfest as Rob and Steve play havoc with all those Vatican Popes in their Prada shoes, downing their zuppa, pesce and carne, and how about those crazy impressions of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas chowing down on their mansaf, maqluba and musakhan? Actually, the final scene of The Trip to Spain here was of a lonely, bereft, out-of-gas Steve, stranded in Morocco, with what seems to be a jeep filled with head-scarved Arabs brandishing guns headed his way, so maybe there is a fourth film planned. Or maybe this is just Winterbottom's eye-wink at us all.
For each film in the Trip series, every meal has become something of a ritual for the cast and crew.
“To be honest, every film is essentially the same,” Winterbottom says. “It occurred to me from the beginning — one of the things I liked about this idea is that the structure is very repetitive. There’s always a meal, and over a meal you can talk about anything. But the shape of the story is always the same: the drive to the restaurant, the starter, the main course, the dessert, the coffee and the bill. I liked that repetitive structure. I mean, we use Michael Nyman’s music, and his work has that same repetitive quality. So, deliberately, for the second and third installments, we have the same structure, even down to the two women — Emma and Yolanda — arriving at the same point in the story.”
You see, Rob ostensibly writes restaurant reviews — and, whew, is there a lot of eating in this film (though I'm not sure how much actual enjoyment of the food) — and Steve writes articles, books and screenplays (though we see no writing per se, just lots of talk about writing, lots of jokey references to previous writing, and lots of cell phone commiseration about the difficulty of writing). They drive, they eat, they joke. The food is a character itself, meticulously presented, lovingly filmed, eagerly swallowed, occasionally regurgitated. Bravo to the brave restaurant staffs who endure and explain what it is the men are eating and drinking. The three films are essentially about the same thing: As they travel and eat, the two men find their perspectives shifting, especially on the subjects of love and family, aging and mortality, and the search for artistic fulfillment. Indeed, they are older now, both Rob/Steve and Rob and Steve, than when they made the first film; they must contend with aging bodies and aging careers (“I’m not up-and-coming. I’ve come already.”), the melodrama of an earlier youth now tinged with the melancholy of middle age. As you roll into your 50s, “We’re ripe fruit. Do you want your fruit to just drop or be plucked?”
Clearly, the duo — and don’t we all — prefer our fruit to be plucked.
And this being Spain, with its Don Quixote/Sancho Panza legacy, threading its way though the film is “Windmills of Your Mind” — music by Michel Legrand, lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman — from the soundtrack to the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair, sung by Noel Harrison, son of Rex Harrison, and famously subsequently recorded by Dusty Springfield. I spend a lengthy sentence on this fact because windmills and “Windmills” and Don/Sancho are a prominent motif of Rob/Steve’s own road adventure as they drive and eat and talk and joke and sing.
“Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever-spinning reel… like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face, and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space, like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind.”
There's a whole lot of circling, spiraling, spinning and sweeping in this movie. Their road quest begins with their initial newspaper commission to travel-write their way through Spain and pose as Don Quixote and Sancho Pancho in front of windmills as part of a ludicrous, but very funny, photo shoot with horse and armor and donkey and a barber’s shaving-basin hat.
You don't need this film reviewer to remind you that Cervantes' Don Quixote is really about two middle-aged men wandering and bumbling their way over the dusty roads of Spain; The Trip to Spain is a Cervantes redux. If there's an occasional nod to the quixotic quest of finding the perfect family and career, the dream of something solid and dependable, the search for the Ideal, it's offset by the puerile silliness and coarse earthiness of their comic schtick. These men beautifully reinvent Cervantes and his iconic characters who dream of the stars while traipsing in the dirt. And there is much chatter about the British poet Laurie Lee and his memoir, I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, which is about leaving his native Gloucestershire village in the Cotswolds to walk to Spain. It becomes Lee's own idealized quest for a new life as he experiences the utterly beautiful and the utterly squalid, until trapped there by the Spanish Civil War.
Rob and Steve effortlessly integrate Cervantes, Lee, movie-making anecdotes, and Spanish culture/history factoids into mealtime conversation as they slip and slide from the witty to the witless. I want friends like this. I watched it all with a wide grin across my face. Each celebrity impression is more exaggerated than the last, and there are many, in no certain order: Sean Connery, John Hurt, Quentin Crisp, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Woody Allen, Laurence Olivier, Russel Brand, Mick Jagger, George Orwell, John Gielgud, Alan Partridge, Roger Moore, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Humphrey Bogart, Michael Caine, and even Caligula and Torquemada. I really want friends like this.
Covering so many miles and giving us so many characters for such a short film, Rob and Steve are the perfect pairing of companionship and one-upsmanship. So amusing, so entertaining, but like traveling together with good friends in a small car on an extended road trip, so exhausting.
This article appears in Sep 7-14, 2017.