The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie Review

The Oddly Familiar Couple

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 28, 2014

The Trip to Italy is the sequel to 2010's The Trip, both of which are quasi-documentary feature films starring British comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as fictional versions of themselves. Coogan is better known in America, having written and starred in the Oscar-nominated Philomena, but both stars are familiar faces in England, Coogan as for his famous alter ego, Alan Patridge (recently seen on Blu-ray in Alan Partridge ) and Brydon for numerous TV roles as both himself and various recurring characters. The two previously co-starred in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, directed by the protean Michael Winterbottom, who also directed The Trip films, each of which later became a six-part TV series on the BBC. IFC Films distributes both movies in the U.S., but only The Trip to Italy has made it to Blu-ray. Maybe that's because the first film was limited to the north of England, which, while picturesque, cannot offer landscapes to compare to the breathtaking vistas that Winterbottom captured in the sequel. Few places on earth could compare.

In the original Trip, Coogan accepted an assignment from The Observer to travel through England's Lake Country and write a series of articles about its inns and restaurants. His real motive was to impress his then-girlfriend, who promptly informed that she wanted time apart. With increasing desperation, Coogan proceeded to run through his acquaintances looking for a travel companion, until he found someone to say yes. That someone happened to be Brydon, whom Coogan informed, with Alan Partridge-style tactlessness that he was far from first choice. The two mismatched companions proceeded to irritate each other throughout their travels in a series of largely improvised conversations that, among other things, showcased both their proficiency at impressions. (Their dueling Michael Caines were a highlight.)

Apparently The Observer liked the result, because now it wants to send them out on the road again. This time there's no question of second, third or fourth choices. The editors have requested their original team—which gives The Trip to Italy a very different interpersonal flavor.

Maybe there's more setup in the serialized TV version (which I haven't seen), but the film assumes that the viewer is familiar with The Trip and wastes no time getting the band back together. Steve receives a call from Rob informing him of The Observer's desire to send them abroad, and Winterbottom cuts directly to the pair cruising through Italy in a Mini Cooper that Rob has managed to secure for the occasion. Steve spots the reference to The Italian Job immediately, because it drops the pair back into their old debate about the proper way to imitate Michael Caine. At their first shared meal, however, the duo segues from mimicking Caine as Bruce Wayne's butler into one of The Trip to Italy's most hilarious routines: an impromptu sketch envisioning a lowly A.D. on the set of The Dark Knight Rises who is given the unenviable task of asking Christian Bale and Tom Hardy to deliver their lines more distinctly. (If you're one of those fans for whom Nolan's Batman trilogy is hallowed ground, you may want to skip this part.)

The relationship between Steve and Rob is just as competitive on this trip, but far less cantankerous. Part of it has to do with expectations. This time, the pair was intended to travel together. But even more of the difference is about time. In The Trip, Steve (or, rather, Steve's alternate version of himself) was still trying to pretend that he was a younger man, which is why he kept seducing women along the way—one of whom reappears in Italy like a pang of guilty conscience—whereas on this second round he seems to have accepted the inevitable march of time and treats life with resigned acceptance. Less self-absorbed, he spends his private time either reading or Skyping with his teenage son, Joe (Timothy Leach), who is unhappily on vacation with Steve's ex-wife. Steve's concern for Joe, which spurs him to take action near the film's end, reflects a side of the character that we never saw in the first film.

Rob, too, is in a different place than he was on their last outing. Still the extrovert of the pair, still given to sprinkling his conversation with impressions of Al Pacino, Hugh Grant, Woody Allen and many others, and still unable to resist goading Steve at every turn, Rob is now father to a three-year-old daughter (she was a newborn in the first film), and he is experiencing the frustration of many recent fathers, as his wife's attention remains focused on the child. Whenever he calls her from the road, she can't stay on the phone with him because the little girl needs something. The emotional void will prompt Rob to stray into territory that, on his previous trip with Steve, would have been unimaginable for him. (As an example of how the comics fictionalized themselves, the real Rob Brydon has five children, with ages spanning from three to twenty.)

The itinerary for Steve's and Rob's trip has them following in the footsteps of the famous 19th Century Romantic poets, Shelley and Lord Byron. Besides the first-class restaurants and luxury hotels, Winterbottom shoots numerous landmarks where the poets lived, and Steve and Rob riff enthusiastically on the scandalously hedonistic lives of those now-revered rebels. Some of their references are pretty obscure—how many American viewers are likely to be familiar with Byron's epic poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?—so that it's almost a relief when they are joined by their editor, Emma (Claire Keelan), who notes that Shelley's wife, Mary, probably had more impact than all the poets combined. She wrote Frankenstein.

In the literary and cultural history of Europe, Italy has always symbolized an ideal of ease, relaxation and tolerance, compared to the tougher, more rigorous conditions of colder northern climes. As Winterbottom's camera takes in one magnificent vista after another, and as the two aging friends pass through ancient landscapes that somehow manage to wear the accumulated centuries lightly, the comic rivalry between Steve and Rob takes on an entirely different tone than in the original Trip. The edge is gone, and what seemed like meanness on their initial outing sounds almost affectionate, like the bantering of old friends, each of whom knows that the other means no harm. And in the end, as Rob cheerfully reminds Steve while they're standing on a beautiful beach, we all end up lying on a slab.

The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Trip to Italy was shot by James Clarke, who was the camera operator for The Trip and spent seven years as cinematographer for the British version of The Apprentice. Specific information about the shooting format was not available, but from appearance and the fact that a TV broadcast was intended from the outset, the photography was clearly digital. Post-production was completed on a digital intermediate, from which IFC/MPI's Blu-ray was presumably sourced.

MPI Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray sports a superb image with travel-brochure-ready vistas of the Italian locales and their rustic villages. Even the traffic jams in the streets of Rome have been photographed to look picturesque. The serenity and antiquity of the Latin surroundings provide the perfect contrast for the incessant bickering and one-upmanship with which Steve and Rob fill their time (not to mention their speculations on how they'll be remembered in 200 years). Detail is so finely rendered that some of the landscapes look almost three-dimensional, and the elaborate color palette, which runs the entire spectrum from deep primaries to delicate pastels, contributes to the sense of journeying through paradise. The rich colors also help show off the cuisine, which, in the shots of its preparation, approaches a kind of gastronomic porn. The suites in the luxury hotels are like mini-mansions, crammed with visual delights.

Whether because of the quality of the original photography or due to the fact that MPI has encoded the 108-minute film on a BD-50 with an average bitrate of 33.60 Mbps, the image has no noise, interference, aliasing, distortion or other artifacts to interfere with one's viewing enjoyment.

The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Consistent with its pseudo-documentary style, the 5.1 soundtrack for The Trip to Italy, encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, is largely front-oriented with the surrounds limited to ambient sounds of the environment. Stereo separation across the front is used effectively for key musical selections, notably "Im Abendrot" by Richard Strauss and Joseph von Eichendorff, which fans of David Lynch's Wild at Heart will recall as the title track from that film. In The Trip to Italy, the selection recurs so frequently that it becomes a self-parody of grandeur, much as Rob and Steve are parodying themselves.

The dialogue is clearly reproduced, but with performers who so rapidly switch intonations and accents and who often toss away their jokes casually, there may be words or whole phrases that don't register until a second viewing. One can always switch on the subtitles, but the written word doesn't have nearly the impact of the delivery by the film's two stars, especially when they're playing off each other.

As is typical for MPI discs, an alternate PCM 2.0 track is included.

The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080i; 1.78:1; 26:00): The scenes are listed, and can't be selected, individually. Some of them are more in the nature of outtakes, particularly a sequence where Coogan keeps flubbing a scripted line.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 2:24).



• Additional Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailer for The Trip, Kelly & Cal, Last Weekend and Days and Nights, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

The Trip to Italy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Trip to Italy is a funny film, but its humor is a distinctively British variety that, while occasionally very silly, relies more on wordplay and understatement than the typical American style of comedy. If your idea of "British comedy" is Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (which may be British creations but are set squarely in the American tradition of Airplane!), then this isn't your kind of film. This is for fans of the original Trip or of director Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story or, perhaps, of Coogan's work as Alan Partridge. For those fans, highly recommended.