Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a maddening, hilarious series of digressions—Shandy spends the entire book trying to get up to the moment of his birth, but keeps getting hopelessly sidetracked. It also includes jokes about the printed word like an all-black page when someone dies. It is, in short, a book-person’s book.

Director Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People) takes Sterne’s work as the starting point for a movie-person’s movie. We start out, without any credits, in the makeup trailer, where Coogan and Brydon are killing time talking about, of all things, the whiteness (or lack thereof) of Brydon’s teeth. The two are on a location shoot for a film version of the Sterne novel, and for the rest of the film we toggle between scenes from the film being made and the petty jealousies, coy flirtations, barely averted crises and all the other madness that surrounds any movie set. In short, we keep getting teased with the possibility of the film, but caught in the digressions of its making.

Coogan and Brydon both happily send themselves up as needy narcissists (Coogan at one point demands higher heels on his shoes so that he will tower over Brydon), and their back-and-forth forms a hilarious through-line for the movie. The book may be, as several people announce during the movie, unfilmable, but Winterbottom has caught Sterne’s spirit perfectly.—Hank Sartin