Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Rated: M
Now Screening

Michael Winterbottom's new film 'Tristram Shandy' is an enlivening and, on the face of it, cluttered adaptation of Laurence Sterne's classic novel 'The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'.

The publicity surrounding the film has largely involved grandiose exclamations of the source material's essential unfilmable-ness, a symptom of its apparent unconventional and structure-defying nature. Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce seem, at least at Afirst, to have acceded to this nauseating maxim, and proceeded instead to make a film about the filming of the 'unfilmable' novel.

Beginning with some mildly anxious and funny conversation in the make-up room between leads Steve Coogan (who plays himself, Tristram, and Tristram's father Walter) and Rob Brydon (who plays himself and Uncle Toby), the film hurriedly shuffles through a segment of scenes from the original story, mainly concerned with Tristram's chaotic birth but including several narrative tangents. These scenes are witty but amateurishly composed, at least by Winterbottom's standards. This is probably intentional, serving as practical evidence of the difficulty of taming such a novel for film.

A quick and exhilarating shift is then made from the inner story to the outer one - from the anarchy of Tristram's birth to the analogous anarchy of a film set. The focus is again on Coogan and Brydon, but this time as private individuals with their own petty concerns and insecurities. Coogan is uptight about virtually everything, especially anything that appears to him to diminish his position as lead actor. Brydon is more comfortable and generally just happy to be in a film at all, and gleefully plays around with Coogan's anxieties to hilarious effect. A host of characters involved with the film orbit these two, and in their various functions constitute the workhorses of the project, tirelessly and thanklessly serving Coogan and Brydon and receiving only criticism in return.

'Tristram Shandy', then, is basically comprised of a convoluted complex of relationships and interactions. Alone these numerous, random exchanges are aimless and only trivially funny. But, importantly, their tone is consistently influenced by the team's frustrations and difficulties in adapting the novel into an acceptable cinematic form. And, as Stephen Fry (playing a curator at this point) explicitly states half way through the film, the novel as a whole is about the 'amorphous' nature of human life and the impossibility of forcing it to conform to any kind of preconceived models, as evidenced in Walter's failed plans for his son Tristram. Thus, because the relationships the film contains are all coloured with the frustration of shaping something according to predetermined standards, it actually ultimately provides a faithful summation and (most importantly) experience of the novel. And in this roundabout way, Winterbottom and company have quite successfully filmed the supposedly unfilmable novel. This, in addition to the fact that 'Tristram Shandy' is wonderfully funny, makes it almost essential viewing.

William McGinley