British duo inject travel with laughs
“The Trip to Greece” is the fourth installment in a series starring British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. In Britain, this is a TV show that has been produced intermittently for a decade. For the U.S. market, each series is edited into a single featurelength movie, with this latest one available on video on demand on Friday, May 22.
In each movie, Coogan and Brydon are sent to a beautiful place (the last time it was Spain, this time it’s Greece) where they take in the scenery and dive into the cuisine. The circumstances within the films are fictional and the people in their lives are played by actors. But Coogan and Brydon pretty much play themselves, and their banter — some of it very funny — is mostly improvised conversation.
Brydon is a relentless personality, and he can occasionally overdo it with his nonstop clowning and mimicking, but not in this film. He gets the first laugh here when, as a response to Coogan’s recent role as Stan Laurel, in “Stan & Ollie,” he invites Coogan to extemporize a meeting between Laurel and Tom Hardy.
Later, Brydon mocks Coogan for telling a fairly pointless story about going outside and sitting under a tree until insects forced him back into the house. Brydon sarcastically praises Coogan for being an amazing raconteur: “Wonderful stories from Steve, the new (Peter) Ustinov.”
At another lunch, this time in Macedonia, Coogan does a funny bit as the cockney actor Ray Winstone, imagining how Winstone would play King Henry VIII.
The ostensible point of the trip is for the men to retrace the journey of Odysseus in “The Odyssey,” from Troy to Ithaca. On British TV, the show was broadcast in three long installments running nearly three hours each. For the movie, these 8½ hours were cut down to a little less than two.
Watching other people eat in a Michelin star restaurant is not the same as eating in one, and, likewise, watching people in gorgeous places is not the same as being there yourself. However, given that most 2020 vacation plans have been curtailed, there is something particularly arresting about seeing the whole phe
nomenon of vacation here: Yes, that’s how it used to be. People, surrounded by other people, would order food and drinks, and someone would bring it out, and nobody worried about getting sick.
Along the way, the movie presents a picture of modern Greece, and though the travelogue aspect is probably less present in the movie version, what we do get to see is arresting: azure seas and magnificent light.
“The Trip to Greece” isn’t nonstop hilarity, but if you get into the rhythm of it, it’s laidback and pleasing. It’s an enjoyable trip in good company.