nick-401 Review of Tristram Shandy

Tristram Shandy (2005)

Please read the book, don't bother with this smug, shallow film

[3/10 · 20 January 2006]

I saw A Cock & Bull Story at the London Film Festival last year. The film should do well: it's been very heavily publicised, has well-known comedy actors in it, and - when I saw it - the packed house loved it. The film is enjoyable primarily because of Steve Coogan's and Rob Brydon's seemingly ad-libbed comedy, but as a version of - or even tribute to - Sterne's Tristram Shandy it fails miserably. The film barely grasps the character of this (anti-) novel at all. I blame director Michael Winterbottom for this. The book's tangential narratives are too briefly handled in the first half to leave the viewer with any real sense of Tristram's gargantuan project. The film's first half races along at breakneck pace, presumably to suggest a mad-cap hilarious confusion to Tristram's narrative - but all I was left with was the feeling that the director was terrified Joe Public might be bored by the boring old eighteenth century. The all-too-jaunty pace suggests a lack of faith in the novel's comedy and a lack of faith in the viewer's intelligence. Tristram Shandy is a very funny book and the humour is evident without such forced jauntiness. Sterne is a notably playful and generous novelist, he loves his readers and never displays a lack of faith in them. The film's lack of faith, in itself as well as in its audience, is also evident in its rendering of the famous black page - discussed by director, writer and actors as to whether it is possible to put the trope of a black page into a film at all. Suddenly the screen goes black! ... but the soundtrack remains and the discussion continues, for five seconds before the audience is reassuringly given back the visuals again. If Winterbottom had Sterne's resolve and experimental touch he would have kept the screen black without sound for, say, fifteen seconds. Making your audience uncomfortable doesn't mean you don't respect them! And what of the actual discussion of the viability of putting the black page in the film? A more courageous experimental film/director wouldn't have flinched from doing it, let alone chat about it in an oh-so funny way. Can you imagine Godard having such qualms? The other big problem with this film is its film-within-a-film conceit. It's all about the impossibility of getting a film made and of faithfully rendering Tristram Shandy, which itself is about the impossibility of faithfully rendering the complexity of life - geddit? If you don't, Stephen Fry is on hand to explain this to you in the manner of a patient uncle at the end of the film. Not only is this a wretched simplification of the book's theme about art and artifice but this theme is itself just one amongst many themes in the book. Tristram Shandy handles these themes with humour and experimental elan but A Cock & Bull Story sticks rigidly to its one theme, wearily restating it again and again (rather than going any deeper) in a way that is more listless than joyfully experimental. What follows on screen is a sort of comedy soap-opera of the prurience that is wrapped up with celebrity (something that has nothing to do with the novel). Some of this soap-opera is indeed very funny, but not as funny as, say, Marion & Geoff or Alan Partridge. If Winterbottom had tried to stick to the novel - a truly courageous and difficult undertaking - instead of heading into the usual fundament-gazing about media and celebrity that masquerades as analysis and filmic experimentation then A Cock & Bull Story would have been wonderful. As it is, the film is rather like what Steve Coogan, put on the spot by Tony Wilson, says about the novel: 'I suppose it's kind of ... a postmodern masterpiece before, er, there was any modern to be post about.' A nice joke, but one that resounds hollow when applied to the film itself. In other words, the film is generally a load of Bull: read the book instead! Corporal Trim