Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

COMEDY

Yorkshire pastor Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has long been considered unadaptable — for precisely the same qualities that enraged some fellow writers of the 1760s (including Samuel Johnson) and that have made it a lasting delight for readers ever since. This ostensible autobiography of the titular well-born mediocrity means to chronicle his entire, rather inglorious history but gets continually sidetracked by his windy philosophizing, digressions-within-digressions, and narrative obliviousness so profound that on one level the thousand-or-so pages never get past describing his own birth. Attracted to the challenge, director Michael Winterbottom and his frequent screenplay collaborator Martin Hardy (though apparently no more: They had a falling-out over the course of this project) have gone the French Lieutenant's Woman route, intercutting scenes from the "unfilmable" literary source with a fictive making-of-the-film saga that satirizes the creative process itself (among other things). Thus, Steve Coogan, cast as Tristram, and Rob Brydon, as Uncle Toby, play themselves as actors not-so-covertly obsessed with who in fact has the bigger part. A harassed Jeremy Northam plays Michael Winterbottom, more or less, and Ian Hart his scenarist. When Gillian Anderson arrives on the set, delighted to be playing Widow Wadman — then alarmed to find the role severely truncated — there is much fuss about how "Agent Scully's" presence might effect budget or box office. Meanwhile, excerpts from the novel surface in suitably chaotic fashion, free-ranging from "epic" war sequences to the formative mishap involving wee baby Tristram's weenus getting caught in a window's guillotinelike closure. All this is very handsomely mounted, droll, clever, and lightly amusing. Hilarious, perhaps, if you know the book by heart and can seize on every in-joke. But for the rest of us, Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy may be most impressive as a stunt, not unlike his sex-centric last feature, 9 Songs — another movie seemingly created primarily because no one had dared, or cared, to try it before. (Dennis Harvey)

TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

www.tristramshandymovie.com