I have not read Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and unless you were an English lit major, odds are pretty good that neither have you. Published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1770, it's a 600-page novel in which Tristram Shandy sets out to tell his entire life story with so many ramblings and digressions that by the time it ends, he's barely gotten to his own birth. The narrator's grief over one character's death is represented by a solid black page; another page is left blank for the reader to fill in as he sees fit. It's a novel that broke all of the rules at a time when the novel was still so new an art form that there weren't any rules to break yet. (Or as the movie's star, Steve Coogan, says at one point, "it was postmodern before there was any modernism to be post about.")
All of that has led many to put Shandy on the list of books that could not possibly be adapted into movies. So how does Winterbottom pull it off? For the most part, by ignoring the book and translating its style and tone to the screen, creating a loopy comic movie that is just as rambling and digressive as the novel.
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are the movie's stars. Coogan plays both Tristram and his father, Walter; Brydon plays Tristram's Uncle Toby. But both actors also play themselves, or versions of themselves, at any rate. The movie opens, in fact, in the makeup room, where Coogan and Brydon are complaining about their costumes and the color of their teeth.
When the opening credits begin and we appear to have finally begun the adaptation proper, Coogan-as-Tristram's first words are, "Groucho Marx once said...," making it immediately clear that we are not in for a straightforward period picture. Most of the opening scenes are centered around the birth of young Tristram -- this is what allows Coogan to play both Tristram, who comments on the action, and Walter, who is part of the action -- and like the novel, the movie never really gets much past that moment.
In fact, by the time the movie's half over, we've pretty much abandoned the pretense of telling Sterne's story at all, and we're now focused on Coogan, Brydon, and the rest of the crew as they struggle to finish making their movie. Coogan's trying to find time to spend with his girlfriend Jenny (Kelly McDonald), but is constantly being distracted by the director and producers, journalists in search of interviews, and a production assistant named Jennie (Naomie Harris) with whom he's been flirting. Brydon's painfully insecure, and is terrified to find out that Gillian Anderson has been hired at the last minute to play his romantic interest, because he's got such an intense a crush on her that he can't possibly play love scenes with her.
There are lots of goofy self-referential moments. As the producers contemplate how to adapt the famous black page of grief, the screen goes dark as we listen to them wonder if audiences will put up with watching a black screen; Coogan interrupts his own TV interview to tell us that the entire interview will be one of the extras on the movie's DVD.
Winterbottom and his co-writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (who are jointly billed here as Martin Hardy) make all of this far less confusing than it could be; the movie flows very gracefully from Shandy to meta-Shandy, and the multiple levels of storytelling are nicely interwoven.
Coogan and Brydon are better known in England than they are here, and there are a few jokes and references to the actors' past roles and careers that don't play as well for American audiences. In addition to the actors already mentioned, there are nice performances from Shirley Henderson and Keeley Hawes, who makes more of an impression than you'd think possible in a role that consists almost entirely of screaming in labor pain through take after take of the scene in which Tristram is born.
No comments:
Post a Comment