Tristram Shandy
survives its unfilmability (and its hero).
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Let's face it,
Tristram Shandy
's not the rattling good read many of us would curl up with on a snowy afternoon. For everyone who didn't do so hot in AP English comes beautifully fruity director Michael Winterbottom's version (or adaptation or rendition) of Laurence Sterne's 1761 novel-but really none of those words comes close to denoting the sidesplitting result. Maybe the whole affair would be best described as an extremely festive train collision with David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon aboard one train-and EM Forster, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle aboard the other-all wearing party frocks and Carmen Miranda hats.
Shandy's infamously "unfilmable" novel is already something of a wreck, the technical term for which is
poioumenon
, meaning (more or less) fiction-in-progress. "It was post-modernist," actor Steve Coogan opines lugubriously, "before there was any modernism to be, um, post about." This absurdist pronouncement handily captures the aesthetic at work here, which will be incomprehensible to some viewers (cf. Pynchon) and will have others falling about laughing.
Winterbottom and co-writer Frank Cottrell Boyce have, you see, made a film...about actors making a film...based on Sterne's book. (If you can keep up, you get a biscuit.) And the screamingly funny conceit is that everyone involved, the actors and producers and directors and even the costume designers, all discuss endlessly how impossible it is to contain in one film the wealth of lived experience that Sterne can't even manage to compress into his own book. It's the kind of recursive hall-of-mirrors silliness that could become an intellectual exercise to bore the doublet and hose off its audience, if it weren't for the fact that we immediately recognize pointy bits of ourselves in the artificial, self-obsessed world of its completely egocentric actors.
Steve Coogan (Steve Coogan) has been cast as both the eponymous hero and his father. This is, we understand, necessary because Tristram isn't even born until many (
many
) pages into his own story. Coogan and Rob Bryson (playing both Rob Bryson and Tristram's Uncle Toby) recline uncomfortably in makeup chairs, exchanging bitchy comments about one another's teeth ("Now that's a color I call Not White...perhaps Tuscan Sunset? Pub
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Ceiling?"). The details of the shoot are painfully accurate to anyone who's ever been in a production, from squabbling over shoe heel height ("It's extremely important to my character to be taller!") to demanding increasingly complicated morning coffees ("I want one of those too...those, those mochaccinos.")-and every night the screenwriters produce additional, increasingly incoherent drafts to compensate for every evening's rushes, with one of the
funniest sequences involving a dispirited debate about whether they can afford a proper battle scene: "Well, Mel Gibson's hardly going to lose sleep over that one, is he? Look at me...I'm leading literally
tens
of men!" Another high point involves the hasty importation of Gillian Anderson to play the Widow Wadman, a beautifully implausible plot development without a single pretension to realism.
In addition to the uncertainty of working with a story and a cast that seems to be changing daily, Coogan's got additional problems: his voluptuous girlfriend Jenny (
Trainspotting
's Kelly Macdonald) has brought their baby to the set, hoping for some quality time, while he's been snogging his earnest, Fassbinder-spouting assistant (
White Teeth
's Naomie Harris). Throw in Stephen Fry as the dull-as-dust curator of Shandy Hall (as well as, without explanation, Shandy's Parson Yorick) and it's as if all of Peter's Friends had accidentally tumbled into a Jane Austen novel. "We've got this thing called irony, you see," a British coworker once explained to me patiently; why, yes, they do, whole Hertfordshire herds of it, with enough to spare for the likes of us.
