Flak Magazine: Review of Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, 03.16.06

Standard fictional practice is to raise questions and postpone the answers as long as interestingly possible, e.g. Who is the foundling's father? Will detective get his man and/or will the guy get the gal? But even when the novel was still relatively novel, a few writers started mocking this convention — most notably, in the 1760s, Laurence Sterne with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Despite its very straight-laced title, Tristram Shandy is anything but orthodox. The reader gets a great deal of opinion but very little of the title character's life. Instead of keeping us in suspense about the fate of his engaging characters, Sterne diverts us with drolleries and asides of all sorts, digressions which become full epics, essays and legal treatises, scholarly apparatus, typographical innovations and lashings of ribaldry. He raises narrative questions, but turns immediately and repeatedly away from them; the story seems always about to fizzle out under all this interruptus. This perfectly befits a work that begins with the main character's conception, which is nearly negated as Mrs. Shandy elects to ask her husband, en flagrante delicto, "Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?" (Note, English majors, the functionality, form and foreshadowing of this comic trope: It arrests a progress with a concern for a progress arresting.) The rest of Tristram is a Tantric form of fiction — it gives rise to narrative questions, but postpones indefinitely any climactic resolution of them.

The idea of adapting Sterne's labyrinthine novel for the cinema is completely absurd, which is perhaps why the task fell to director Michael Winterbottom and stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (who brought us the indie hit 24 Hour Party People) in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Coogan, a rising British comedian sometimes compared to the late Peter Sellers, expresses no love for one of his country's chief cultural exports: "As soon as I see period costume, I turn off." A Cock and Bull Story provides the perfect opportunity to send up Merchant/Ivory and the Channel Four series that eventually became Masterpiece Theater. The movie doesn't adapt the proto-meta-novel; it's about people on the fool's errand of filming it. We enter the story in medias res, joining on-set a company that has been laboring on that film for a year. The cast actually seems to have been drawn from the pool of players whose bread and butter is the perennial iterations of Austen, Dickens, Thackeray and Wilde — Jeremy Northam, Stephen Fry, Gillian Anderson and even Kelly MacDonald of Trainspotting fame. The production has apparently been through many pitches and multiple rewrites and is now is in the semi-desperate reshoot phase. Romances and rivalries are simmering in the posh country house being used for both lodging and location, as the star, writer and director fret over the rushes and the movie production staggers in search of a third reel. Cock and Bull does for Tristram Shandy what 60 Second Shakespeare does for Hamlet, reducing it to its essential parts.

The writers, Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce (author of the brilliant Millions), do adopt Sterne's counter-narrative method; they set up multiple storylines with sitcom slavishness (Will the movie be completed? Who will be its real star? Will the philanderer be found out? And will we learn where Toby was wounded?), then take them practically nowhere, or detour them into apparently irrelevant comic set pieces. Meanwhile, the fictive dream is rudely jostled by the actors' frequent references to their "real" lives, especially their lives since Party People. This gives the film a strange feel, somewhere between "reality" show and mockumentary. Still, some individual scenes play quite straight; their narrative is just as seamless as anything from Hollywood. But they're jammed between others that pun on of every level of artifice and frame, full of characters' self-conscious blather about performance and cinema. In one such scene, the designated sexpot finds discussion of Fassbinder highly aphrodisiac. Other scenes warp into total surreality: the moment of Toby's conception incorporates file-footage of Pavlovian dogs to explain just why Mrs. Shandy is concerned about her spouse's winding of the clock — a touch amazingly consistent with Sterne's text. And a straight lift from the novel's romantic subplot spoofs the high-toned period roles Gillian Anderson has taken since she quit being Agent Scully, but ends, almost inexplicably, in one of the most bizarre special effects ever screened. It seems like some horrific Freudian dream-sequence, except we never get the cliché cut to anybody awakening; we just move onto something entirely unrelated. But by then we're not surprised; the viewer grows used to the non-sequitur MO.

Much film-studies ink will be spilled over Cock and Bull, theses about its gestations, literal and symbolic, about its creations and re-creations, about its shifting frames of reference as performers deconstruct performance. But that doesn't mean it's not funny. The "Tristram Shandy" "director" may speak for Cock and Bull when he explains the omission of an expensive scene to the producers by saying, "It wasn't funny. It has to be really funny." Not everyone will get the sort of humor they left in — the Adam Sandler crowd won't, but The Daily Show fans might. The Sterne fans certainly will, for the writers have at least captured the novel's self-similar fractal essence. One never really gets to suspend disbelief in any of Cock and Bull's subplots, but the time flies by even without the standard narrative drive. After I saw it, everyone in the theater with me seemed surprised, bewildered, but finally bemused. It's the only film I've ever been to — even in Hollywood, where they're snottily doctrinaire about it — where nobody left before the last credit.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)