TRISTAM SHANDY: A COCK & BULL STORY

I’ve been an ardent fan of director Michael Winterbottom ever since I saw “Welcome to Sarajevo” in ’97. Shot in country, it put you in the heart of the Bosnian War with a reporter who puts his objectivity on hold and becomes an active participant in the struggle to save a group of homeless children, and one girl in particular. Like Volker Schlondorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), shot in Beirut with a very real Holiday Inn burning in the background and charred bodies in the street in the foreground the line between reality and fiction is blurred. In 2000 Winterbottom made one of my all time favorite movies, “24 Hour Party People” with Steve Coogan. He played Tom Wilson the founder of Factory records. Coogan as Wilson the reporter and Wilson the raconteur often speaks directly to the camera spinning his tall tale to enlighten and inform his actions and motives. In retrospect, the movie looks like a primer for “Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.” Surprisingly, each of Winterbottom movies have a documentary feel that are as much a part of their style and substance as the subject matter despite the dramatic differences in plot and structure. The style and substance of Michael Winterbottom’s techniques as a filmmaker are what “Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” are all about.

Until this movie came out the novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy: A Gentleman” by Laurence Sterne, the basis for Winterbottom’s movie, was just a blip to me in The Reader’s Companion to World Literature. Sterne’s novel was published in volumes over a number of years beginning around 1760. According to the reference book, the author was not interested in a plot as much as he was in portraying an assortment of eccentrics in an elliptical style unlike anything in the literature of its day. By all accounts, it was a novel that defied description then and puzzled filmmakers who longed to turn it into a movie with a feel for its time like the 1963 screen version of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” published in 1749. Instead of trying to create a movie based on the book’s multiple points of view,  Winterbottom adapts the style of the book with a loopy narrative that drifts seemingly haphazard from the text of the novel, the novel as it is being turned into a movie, and the off camera shenanigans of the people making the movie. The problems that the actors face off camera in their faux real lives often parallel the problems of the characters they are portraying in the movie within the movie. Ultimately, the lines separating the historical fiction of Shandy’s story and those of the actors on and off the set become blurred by cross references, bickering in and out of character, and the interference of producers, publicists, reporters, and the one person who may have actually read the book who has a constant need to interpret the actions of the characters in contemporary terms.

Steve Coogan plays three distinct roles: As himself, Tristam’s father Walter Shandy, and Tristam who shows up as Steve Coogan being lowered into a mockup of a womb so he can comment on the experience of being born. He also appears as his alter ego Alan Partridge from his British TV series who,  as I understand it,  is similar to Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders. Rob Brydon, who is apparently another English TV personality who has an ongoing friendly rivalry with Coogan, plays Tristam Shandy’s Uncle Toby. Throughout the duo constantly try to outdo each other, sometimes with self deprecating humor, other times by example. Like many of Winterbottom’s films, the actors were encouraged to improvise.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the script ended  and the adlibbing began.  The finale is a corker with Brydon doing a  riff on Al Pacino and Coogan himself with Coogan stammering for a comeback line.

Ultimately “Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” is a barrage of off handed one liners, outrageous situations and bawdy humor that often hit their mark. The movie didn’t make me laugh out loud but it did make me smile a lot.

                                                                                                                      Copyright 2006

Here’s movie based on a play that has some of the behind-the-scenes flavor of “Tristam Shandy…”

“Noises Off” (1992) - Based on a hit Broadway show, director Peter Bogdonavich puts an all star cast through the paces behind the scenery while a play they are in is being played out before an audience on the other side of the set. With Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, and Chritopher Reeves among others.

Two films from Michael Winterbottom that stay closer to their literary origins, both based on novels by Thomas Hardy.

“Jude” (1996) - Based on Jude the Obscure, Chritopher Eccleston plays a self educated 19th Century stone mason whose chiseled features seem carved out of the same stone in the city where he plies his trade while trying to find his place in a society that looks down on him. Kate Winslet plays his rebellious distant cousin who becomes his lover in doomed affair. Vastly underrated.

“The Claim” (2000) - Peter Mullan plays the town kingpin in a snowed in North California gold town who is ready to pay for the wages of his sins when the wife and daughter he sold for a stake in a gold claim in his earlier life come back to haunt him. Based on The Mayor of Casterbridge with Wes Bentley (“American Beauty”), Nastassi Kinski, and Sarah Polley.

A personal Michael Winterbottom favorite.

 “Wonderland” (1999) - A random sampling of events in the life of a family are connected thematically through each one’s sense of loss, guilt, or hope for a better future. Their interests merge in the carnival atmosphere of Bonfire Night in England in late November when a young son disappears from his father’s flat and a new member of the family is ready  to come into the world. The relationships are revealed in layers through a method of exposition that challenges the audience without underestimating its intelligence. Commonplace events from a breakfast between two sisters to their mother’s sleepless night are turned into elements of comedy and heartbreak.   The push and pull of everyday life test the bonds that keep them together despite their human frailties. With a cast og mostly unknowns in the States, the most recognizable actors are Stuart Townsend and Ian Hartley.