‘Trip to Spain’ is a comic study of male vanity

If you're going to see "The Trip to Spain," or even if you have seen it, you may want to check out the review of the film that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio: 

For the third time now, British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has taken us with him as he follows Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on their various “Trips” though the world of good food, posh lodgings and the fragile male ego.

We’ve experienced their exploits in England, in Italy and now on the Iberian Peninsula in “The Trip to Spain.” The experience involves watching Coogan and Brydon’s ongoing attempts both to weather the uncertain currents of their respective careers while attempting to one-up each other by comparing their personal lives and, professionally, by offering competing celebrity impressions.

 That may not sound like a good recipe for humor, but in the hands of Winterbottom et al, it often is. Especially when the two comic actors perform their usual spot-on impressions of such celebrities as Mick Jagger, Roger Moore and, of course, Michael Caine.

 At the same time, each of the trips – and especially “The Trip to Spain” – provides a sobering look at what often happens when male vanity hits that stage in life when looks forward are laced with limitation and looks back are colored by regret.

 In terms of art, such a film project is a delicate balancing act, one that won’t appeal to everyone – especially since it’s been going on since the BBC aired its first Winterbottom-directed television series in 2010. Titled simply “The Trip,” the six-part series was edited into a two-hour feature. “The Trip to Italy” followed a similar creative path in 2014, as did this year’s Spanish venture.

 As in the past films, Coogan and Brydon – both playing, as the actors have explained in interviews, exaggerated versions of themselves – are in somewhat different places.

 Coogan is still vainly attempting to find the kind of love that lasts more than one night, though this time he is involved with a married woman. He wants to connect with his son, but that isn’t going the way he’d hoped. And he is dealing with a stalled career in the form of a new agent and a studio that wants to rewrite a screenplay he is trying to sell.

 Brydon, meanwhile, is caught up in a domestic swirl that seems to be marked mostly by crying children. No wonder he is eager to hit the road, even with a guy who is his frenemy. Professionally, he is being targeted by Coogan’s former agent, who is now in a position to help him become more than Sancho Panza to Coogan’s Don Quixote.

 That Cervantes reference, by the way, is no mere metaphor. Owing to the actual purpose of the Spanish trip, Coogan and Brydon do at one point dress up as the literary duo for a photo shoot. It’s also a focal point of Coogan’s imperious intentions, a quest for more adventure in a life that – despite two, count them, two – Oscar nominations has become more than slightly stale.

 It’s all a tad sad, though to me at least that makes “The Trip to Spain” a richer experience. Comic and enlightening. Imagine Coogan saying that – in the voice, of course, of Mick Jagger.