ScreenWize

How do you make a contemporary 90-minute film from a nine-volume story written in the 18th century about a character who only manages to get born at the end of volume four? Michael Winterbottom, who clearly relishes filmmaking challenges, has managed to do it with biting British wit, mainly by superimposing another story – the making of the film itself – on top of Laurence Sterne’s classic shaggy dog saga of conception, digression and impotence.

Sterne’s substantial anti-novel – for it is as much a comment on the literary form as it is a story about the ill-fated hero Tristram - was reduced to a mere thirty minutes of plot by writer Frank Cottrel Boyce, who also worked with Winterbottom on Code 46 and 24 Hour Party People, and who wrote the delightful screenplay for Millions. The greater part of the film is therefore the story of the cast and crew parodying themselves as a competitive, paranoid and superficial bunch of filmmakers struggling with their egos and relationships and desperately trying to raise enough money for a decent battle scene.

The cast is a smorgasbord of British talent, with X-Files Gillian Anderson thrown in for good measure. Steven Coogan plays Tristram Shandy as well as his own father Walter Shandy, and his bad alter ego. It is Coogan and Rob Brydon (who plays Tristram’s kindly and boorish uncle Toby) who take centre stage in the film, and it is their competitiveness that the wonderfully understated comedy is built around. The film’s opening and closing sequences, with the two comedians discussing their fading looks and their ability to impersonate Al Pacino, are priceless.

Overall it’s a playful, sardonic and self-referential piece that will clearly appeal to film buffs and critics more than it might to those who prefer a straight story. At times the ‘making of’ component drags and would have benefited hugely with more of Sterne’s witty masterpiece which is brilliantly brought to the big screen with Winterbottom’s creative staging. As Stephen Fry (who plays Parson Yorick) says in the film “hardly anyone in the book is in the film!”

Some of the promotional blurb suggests that the film is Being John Malkovich meets Adaptation. It’s not quite that heavyweight, and has sacrificed some of Sterne’s complex depth for television-style comic digression. More like The Office meets The Draughtsman’s Contract in a thoroughly delightful and wicked examination of filmmaking.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon