Tristram Shandy

I found this film to be a pleasure from the very beginning, when actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are sitting in their makeup chairs, discussing the color of Brydon's teeth. Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom have re-teamed, after their equally enjoyable 24 Hour Party People, to make another film that can be described as a "metafilm." They have chosen as their subject matter a novel that might have been the first work of metafiction or, as Coogan says in the film, a work of post-modernism before there was any modernism.

The book is Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which has confounded readers for 250 years. I am scandalously unread in 18th-century British literature, so haven't even held the book in my hands, but I've read horror stories about it. Roger Ebert has written that he's tried to read it many times, and John Updike lists it as the book he would like to read before dying. So how do you make a film of a book like that? Make a film about making a film.

The result is a consistently humorous ninety minutes relying on the wit of Coogan and Brydon. Probably less than half the film is actually scenes from the novel, in which Coogan plays Shandy, who is trying to tell his life story, but keeps going off on tangents. Coogan also plays Shandy's father, while Brydon is Uncle Toby, who was wounded in a sensitive area during a battle. When the cameras stop rolling we follow the actors and crew members as they try to make sense of what they are doing, while they are being pressured by the money people to include a big battle scene. The verisimilitude is so well established that I couldn't be sure where fiction ended and reality began. Coogan, in the film, plays himself, and there are numerous references to other work he has done, such as his TV character Alan Partridge, but also has a girlfriend and a baby, and the girlfriend is played by Scottish actress Kelly McDonald (though she is called Jenny). I had to do a little research to see if McDonald was actually his girlfriend (she's not).

There's also a funny scene involving actress Gillian Anderson, who is brought on as a big American star, and plays herself to amusing affect. I also loved the character of the production assistant, played by Naomie Harris, as a film geek obsessed with Fassbinder.

This film is the kind of rich, out-of-the-box cinema that reinvigorates the senses. If that weren't enough, as part of the extras actor Stephen Fry (who plays a small part in the film) visits Stern's home and has a chat with a Stern expert. It's the kind of erudite conversation that it seems only the British can get away with. I may have to try to read the book, at least sometime before I die.