A series built around two funnymen making Michael Caine jokes while eating poached fish closes on Homeric invocations and the melancholy murmur of undiscovered countries. The trip is ending, but it’s not over yet.
When you reach a certain age you make a kind of deal with melancholy as a feature rather than a bug of everyday life. It would be foolhardy for the movie to pretend otherwise, as far as these fellows are concerned. But the fellows manage to seize the days anyway, and the food they eat—largely the riches of the sea—and the banter they exchange are rich and fulfilling. And the duo remains great company.
The larger problem is that by trying to give “The Trip to Greece” some heft, Winterbottom only draws attention to the series’ lack of interest in history, other people, the politics of global tourism and, well, the world.
The reassuring consistency of Winterbottom’s series over the last decade may have called for a more satisfying ending than The Trip to Greece offers, though it’s perhaps fitting that a bittersweet tale of mortality and transience should ultimately expose some of its own limitations but still leave us wanting more.