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The ideal candidate to see Michael Winterbottom’s wonderfully dry making-of-a-movie spoof Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story would be a Brit or anglophile who’s plugged into movies and/or showbiz.
The worst would be any bibliophile who regards Laurence Sterne’s 18th century novel The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, as a sacrosanct work of literature.
An ahead-of-its-time novel about a nobleman’s futile attempt to tell his own life story, Tristram Shandy is widely regarded as “unfilmable” — hence the central joke in Winterbottom’s meta-exercise Cock And Bull Story (in which the director himself is represented as a character named “Mark,” played by Jeremy Northam).
The movie Tristram Shandy — which debuted at the Toronto International Film Fest — bounces blithely between the events in the movie-within-the-movie, and the movie itself. The latter is a seat-of-the-pants cinematic disaster marred by financial problems, its star’s problematic lovelife and his hilarious rivalry with his co-star.
The fractiousness between Steve Coogan (who plays himself as well as Tristram Shandy and Tristram’s father Walter) and Rob Brydon (himself, as well as Tristram’s uncle Toby) is the real “meat” of the movie.
The movie opens and closes with the two comic actors giving each other sharp, half-joking “digs.” And as his private life threatens to melt down as convincingly as the production, Coogan also has to contend with Brydon’s manoeuvring of his character into a bigger role (with a love interest, played by the bankable yet extremely “available” X-Files star Gillian Anderson, playing herself, natch).
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Confused? It doesn’t matter. Tristram Shandy is an unselfconscious mess that starts in the middle of its own story and goes practically nowhere. Coogan — who’s portrayed as a conceited pratt — is visited on-set by his girlfriend and their baby, even as he becomes dangerously flirtatious with his scriptgirl.
Meanwhile, a tabloid blackmails him into giving an interview by threatening to print a tell-all piece about his affair with a stripper.
Throughout, there are myriad showbiz “in-jokes” (only some of them indecipherably British), and a duel of Al Pacino impressions that’s worth sitting through the credits for.
In the end, Tristram Shandy-the-novel remains “unfilmable.” But in its stead, Winterbottom has given plugged-in moviegoers a visceral, mind-bending meta experience, and some good laughs.
Bottom line
The “unfilmable” novel remains unfilmed, but Winterbottom’s movie is a terrifically-dry spoof of the moviemaking process, and the pretensions and egos therein. Very British in its spoofery. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon “make” the movie with their hilarious portrayal of an ego-coddled star and his competitive, scene-stealing “friend” and co-star.
(This film is rated 14A)