Captain America’s Trip
Both sides of the pond, both sides of the self...
In one corner, The Trip, a teeny movie featuring two middle-aged English actors imitating other actors! In the other corner, Captain America, a red, white, and blue bombast with a budget to match!
Captain America, the final installment of the prequels to the upcoming Avengers extravaganza, is unlike any of its brethren, which were all much modernized and shared a certain winking self-awareness. Those movies (especially Iron Man and Thor) felt free to poke fun at their sometimes cheesy pulp roots...until it came time to bring the pain, at which point they wholeheartedly embraced the magic of the Marvel universe for ass-kicking purposes. Captain America is different: it never seems to have left that golden age. Colors are bright, suits are starched, hair is coiffed, and there is a gloss of Progress over the whole movie that repels the irony of later eras. That’s no surprise, since it was directed by the same guy who did The Rocketeer (Joe Johnston), which was a soft-edged propaganda poster of a Disney movie that also launched itself into irony-free paradise.
That look is seductive, since there’s so much bound up into it: the mythos of the Greatest Generation, as well as the World’s Fair-style promise of endlessly better tomorrows. One hardly has to add characters and plot to such a look....oh wait, yes you do, or else you end up with this.
Happily, Captain America does an admirable job of providing fleshed-out characters (with the notable exception of Red Skull -- there was evidently only so much flesh to go around). It goes a bit overboard with the historical revisionism: Cap’s unit includes an Asian(American) dude and an African-American dude along with the central casting types, as well as a woman (British, confusingly) in an authority position. But this slide toward Captain Planet territory is understandable, and it hardly affects the larger story, so really, what’s the problem? You could even argue that this movie is balancing out the equally ridiculous demographics of say...Saving Private Ryan, in which World War II was apparently fought exclusively by red-blooded Americans. Captain America embraces the fact that WWII was a world war, and thus flings our hero around the globe on his quest for justice.
The Trip (2010) is the polar opposite of Captain America. It’s British, for starters, and the two protagonists couldn’t give a shit about any world but their own personal universes. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play meta-versions of themselves -- reasonably successful actors struggling to make it to the next tier of fame or to resign themselves to the status they’ve already achieved. Actors are like sharks: stop swimming and you die. Or, actually, like capitalists: it’s not enough to maintain; you must expand, or you are branded a failure.
Though it dances along the line between documentary and fiction, this film is basically the English Sideways1. The two protagonists -- I can’t call them heroes -- find themselves off for a week in the Lake District, visiting posh restaurants and hotels as part of a magazine gig. Like the guys in Sideways, they are sometimes funny, frequently maudlin, and occasionally sex-obsessed. However, since they’re also British, they spend some time running around expounding on Wordsworth & Coleridge, and the general splendor of the north of England, so I felt much less of an urge to punch them in the kidneys.
The Trip was billed as a comedy. It’s not. There are some laughs, most stemming from Steve and Rob’s dueling impressions of Michael Caine and Al Pacino. On the whole, the movie is a meditation on fame, and the vagaries of the film/TV industry in regards to loyalty and respect. Basically, actor-shit. Now, these themes certainly can be relevant to any person or job (Why am I here and what do I hope to achieve?), but when confined to the film world, their musings are not really profound enough to justify a whole movie.2 And indeed, it doesn’t even fill this one. Several scenes are devoted to foodie-porn, as waiters set meals in front of our guys while giving rapid-fire descriptions of the courses that sound too pretentious to be real (sadly, I think they are real).
If actors can spend a week fretting about soup flavors and the ramifications of their career choices, surely the late night discussions at the Avengers‘ mansion must get pretty fucking deep. These people -- these heroes -- do not portray saviors, they are saviors. Nations depend upon them. So when Steve Rogers must choose between helping a personal friend and pursuing the orders he’s been given, it’s unsurprising that he spends a sincere moment pondering the ethical dilemma. But it’s only a moment. Rogers, aware that time is ticking away, makes his choice and deals with the consequences, good and bad.
That’s the core difference between Captain America and The Trip, far beyond the obviously dissimilar styles/tone/look/scope/everything. The people in Captain America act, the actors in The Trip talk. The characters in the Marvel universe are acutely aware that their decisions matter, and that those decisions must be made quickly, before you run out of panels in your comic.3 The guys in The Trip, stuck in the real universe, lack that awareness, or choose to ignore it in favor of endless self-doubt, such as when Steve Coogan confesses that he wants movie roles with prestige, not steady TV work. Is it more realistic? Sure. But it’s a slog to sit through.
What does it mean when we feel a truer response to the bravery of a skinny Steve Rogers, who jumps on a grenade in a selfless act that never occurred outside this comic book world, than we might for Steve Coogan, who is presumably bearing a secret closer to his own soul than anything in Stan Lee’s universe? Probably, it just means we like exciting stories. Because the best stories don’t have to be real to be true.
1 A bit of research tells me that The Trip is actually a very edited-down version of a TV mini-series aired in Britain last year. That may explain the disjointed feel and wildly varying tone of scenes. But I assume, unless they took out an entire subplot, that the general idea is the same: meta-actors eat while navel-gazing.
2 It’s rather like when pop stars sing about the burdens of “too much fame.” First, boofuckinghoo. That’s what you wanted, bitches. Now suck it up off your gold-plated coke mirror. Those songs are annoying, not just because of the misplaced self-pity, but because they do not speak to the average fan, who by and large, is not famous. Your bitching about the paparazzi gives listeners little to identify with, other than perhaps the fantasy of being famous themselves.
3 I think that’s the nerdiest metaphor for life I’ve ever come up with.