Turning a book, any book, into a movie is usually a sure-fire way to boost its sales. Thanks to their big-screen versions, no airport or card shop book display is any longer complete without a few dozen paperbacks worth of Memoirs of a Geisha or Lord of the Rings. Despite all this, I have a funny feeling that director Michael Winterbottom's recent adaptation of Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman won't do much to help the 18th century novelist's current market. The modern reader may be predictably unwilling to slog through several hundred pages worth of presumptuous discourse on the English countryside. But until now, it would have been equally hard to imagine any sane director willingly taking up an enigmatic, experimental period piece like Sterne's book.
But Winterbottom and his cast have developed an ingenious solution. Rather than a clean cut adaptation -- the kind of to-the-word mangling often seen on public television -- this Tristram Shandy is a movie about the making of a movie about Tristram Shandy. Confusing? Of course. Yet, considering the wit with which Winterbottom and his cast explore such a convoluted premise, there's a lot to like about this medium-conscious, exceedingly good-natured piece of cinema.
As the film opens, we find Tristram (Steve Coogan) trotting about his estate and talking about the events that led up to his birth. The lead's narration, full of digressions and convoluted scenarios, is intermixed with footage of his uncle Toby (Rob Brydon), a war veteran who has set up a scale model of the battle where he was wounded in his garden. Don't get too comfortable -- just when the story seems to be picking up steam, the camera cuts away and reveals a full movie crew, jolting you into the modern world and complicating the context of our earlier encounters
When we leave the movie-within-a-movie behind, much of the action in Tristram Shandy centers on Coogan (playing himself), who has to endure, among other things, pretentious historical costumes and Brydon's jockeying for a more prominent role. Their competition is surprisingly benign for a behind-the-scenes intrigue, riding more on a preening, uniquely British wit than anything else. With a dutiful girlfriend (Kelly MacDonald), a new baby and a small media scandal brewing around him, Coogan winds up playing the straight man to Brydon's preening fixation on everything from the state of his teeth to where his name appears in the credits.
For some reason, Winterbottom never really mines the comic potential of this situation. Nor does he make enough of the hilarious fact that, of all the people making Tristram Shandy, almost none have read Sterne's book. The only person familiar with the original text is a production assistant named Jennie (Naomie Harris), who provides, among other things, a forbidden love interest for Steve. It's exactly the brand of kindly-conceived, well-intentioned role that is thoroughly out of place in the pompous wit that animates the film.
Indeed, there are some hilarious shots. My personal favorite, during the lead up to Tristram's birth, involves spliced shots of servants running around aimlessly, Tristram's mother (Keeley Hawes) screaming in labor pains, and a collision between two men on horses. However, in packing so much mayhem into the early shots, the film threatens to exhaust its comic intelligence. By the time we get around to the more elaborate gags, like one scene where Coogan must deliver a monologue from inside a giant plastic uterus, we can only hope and pray that Winterbottom has a few tricks left up his sleeve.
It's the same complaint that goes for Albert Brooks' similarly reflective Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. By cramming their top material into the first half-hour, both free up more time for conceptual exploration. In this regard, Tristram Shandy morphs into a surprisingly intelligent commentary on the process of creating a modern film. Like The Player or Adaptation, it gives its characters plenty of breathing room while stressing how deeply the creative process can immerse them in their material.
And as with Adaptation, it is a belated attempt in Tristram Shandy to shift towards commercial appeal that proves most revealing. I'm not merely talking about the film's bawdy caption (A Cock and Bull Story), but about the maneuverings of Winterbottom's fictional cast and crew to yoke a cameo by Gillian Anderson of The X-Files, a big battle sequence and a sentimental revelation by Tristram's father, played by Coogan in a wig, to their otherwise artsy film. We never approach the sublime faux realism of, say, Christopher Guest, in spite of the chemistry that Coogan and Brydon reveal in easy dialogues on everything from middle-age balding to Al Pacino. Though it gets both a little too silly and a little too humane, Trisrtam Shandy redeems itself by daring to weigh in meaningfully about art, life and the exercise in egoism and opportunism that is the making of a modern movie.
