Movie Review: "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

*** stars (out of four)
91 minutes, Now Playing

“Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” is like a head-on collision between a Merchant-Ivory piece and a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. It is an attempt to adapt a novel that is unadaptable, by its nature, and the movie deals with this by making the fact that it can’t be done the subject of the movie…to a degree. It is not as non-linear as Kaufman’s brilliant “Adaptation,” which was so confused the author made himself the lead character, but it’s plenty confused as it is.

I have not read the original novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” upon which this film is, ahem, based, but I suspect having read the novel would not help in interpreting the film. Or maybe it would. Who knows. The book, which I only heard of when I learned of the movie, is in essence a book about distraction - the lead character attempts to tell his life story, and becomes so sidetracked with digressions and secondary bits that the book ends not long after he’s just finished recounting his birth. In short, the book is apparently a non-event - a terrifically entertaining one, I gather, but a deliberately without incident.

I’m not sure if the film began as an honest attempt to translate the material (as “Adaptation“ began), or if it’s always been planned like this, but the beautiful part about the film is, it really doesn’t matter either way. What we have is a very entertaining film on two levels - the portions that purport to be from the original novel have a manic energy to their performance, and are tremendously funny, but the real movie begins when the camera unexpectedly turns and we suddenly see a camera crew.

Well, “unexpectedly” is incorrect. We have had a pre-titles debate between Steve Coogan (who plays Shandy and himself) and Rob Brydon (who plays Toby and himself) while in the make-up chair. They discuss such topics as their relative billing (if it was alphabetical order, Brydon notes, he’d be first billed) and the color of Brydon’s teeth (not quite white). Then the movie spends about, oh, 20 minutes pretending to be an adaptation of the Victorian costume farce before the “real world” interrupts again.

The scenes from the novel (I guess) have an inspired comic tone to them - Coogan, as Shandy, notes that his father looked quite a lot like him, so it makes perfect sense that he play his own father in flashbacks. Like the book before it, the story of Tristram (so much as we see) never really gets beyond the event of Tristram’s birth - Tristram gets consistently sidetracked with other irrelevant (and consistently funny) details, then brings us back to the main gist of it. This segment seems to demonstrate just how a true movie based upon the source material might have gone - and it goes so well that I was almost disappointed when the film switched gears.

But that’s not to say that the films main passage isn’t a great time, either. We suddenly see the crew, the actors drop out of character, and we are now behind the scenes of the making of a Tristram Shandy movie. The filming is in trouble, on a few levels. Coogan is paranoid about his position as the lead, insisting that his shoes be built higher so that he will be taller than Brydon (purely for character reasons, he states). The producers don’t want to chip in more money so that an important battle scene can be improved upon. Coogan is introduced to a giant womb apparatus that he is supposed to be lowered into for a scene (bringing up inescapable comparisons to “Spinal Tap”). At one point, a crew member mentions a subplot involving “the Widow Wadman.” Coogan, who’s never read the novel, either, brings up the subplot in conversation, and within five minutes the filmmakers have cast Gillian Anderson in the role. Coogan feels as though he’s saved the day - until he realizes that the addition now gives Brydon a larger part than his own.

Coogan’s performance is the key to the whole enterprise. As both the lead character of the imaginary adaptation and himself, he has to play widely varying notes while still maintaining a level of absurdity. Even a drop of ego into the bucket would have shattered the visage - who wants to look foolish when playing themselves? But Coogan allows his character to be portrayed as a unique combination of talent and paranoia, with plenty of flaws and neuroses thrown in for effect. A messy affair is touched upon, but a fluff magazine agrees to bury the story in exchange for an interview. His girlfriend and their son visit him on the set, but he’s more concerned about finding out how much of his role he’s just forfeited with the Widow Wadman suggestion. He has a pseudo-flirting relationship with a production assistant named Jennie (winningly played by Naomie Harris), the resolution of which essentially provides the resolution of the story, though the film understandably ends somewhat shakily (like its predecessor).

The result is an odd and entertaining film, one which I think I have to see again to truly appreciate the whole of the endeavor. There are just too many subtle touches and silly side bits (in both the main film and the film-within-a-film), I suspect, to catch them all the first time. And maybe reading the novel would help, as well. Or maybe not.