Now Playing: Yo La Tengo--"Stockholm Syndrome"
Things to say about Michael Winterbottom's film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005):
1. Weirdly enough, I, like Uncle Toby, am often given to whistling "Lilliburlero," the last time while using the facilities during the show at Betsy's Friday night.
2. Winterbottom does it again. Shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor, alone and relatively friendless in a strange town, his 24 Hour Party People (2002) began playing at the Michigan Theater and then at the State, where I saw it a total of four times. The movie chronicled, in a breezily postmodern and self-referential fashion (at times too much so), the experiences of British TV personality Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) in creating and running Manchester-based Factory Records (home of influential groups such as Joy Division and New Order) from 1976 to 1992. I'd become acquainted with some of the music while in Akron, and the movie became a favorite of mine, largely at first as a welcome celebration of the familiar.
Tristram Shandy uses the same fractured, irreverent approach (and several of the same actors) in telling the tale of the filming of Laurence Sterne's 1767 novel of the same name. I read it in college, and wasn't nearly as entertained as I was while reading it over the past couple of weeks. Allegedly the story of "Tristram Shandy, Gent.," its multitudinous digressions result in Tristram's own life occupying a relatively small portion of the novel. Much of the rest concerns the wacky exploits of Tristram's relatives, especially the garrulous Uncle Toby, a distinguished (and obsessive) veteran of the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97), who recreates a large-scale model of the Battle of Namur (1695)--in which he was wounded and invalided out of the service--in the grounds of the family estate at Shandy Hall. How does one film a non-story like that?
Director "Mark" (a sidesplittingly haggard Jeremy Northam, every one of whose closeups scream "what the fuck did I get myself into?") and his intrepid band give it a try. Steve Coogan plays himself playing Tristram and Tristram's father (it's that kind of movie). Much of the film's humor and drama (all right, mostly humor) come from Coogan balancing his feelings for his girlfriend and for the Fassbinder-crazed production assistant (both named Jenny, both gorgeous, and played by Kelly MacDonald and Naomie Harris, respectively), as well as struggling to defend his leading-man status in the film from Rob Brydon (playing himself playing Uncle Toby). Brydon's something of a revelation; in Party People, he played an annoying, cartoonishly square journalist whose sole function seemed to be making Tony Wilson look cool by comparison. Here, he's a very likeable actor whose relative lack of ego makes Coogan a bit of a prat (or more of a prat than already portrayed in the film). Other Party People vets include Shirley Henderson (who played Wilson's girlfriend) as housekeeper Susannah, and Raymond Waring (who played Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column) as Uncle Toby's loyal servant and former comrade, Corporal Trim. The actors are great, including Gillian Anderson, who finds herself called in to play Uncle Toby's love interest in an excised scene re-included in the movie and then cut again after the honchos decide it isn't funny. James Fleet and one of my favorite actors, Ian Hart, are great at getting down the constant frustrations of the producer and writer. There are a whole host of historical reenactors for the battle of Namur sequence who discover that their costumes are nearly a century out of date. Beautiful.
What of the movie itself? It's a little more difficult to dig in some ways than Party People simply due to its messy, chaotic nature. Party People was a historical narrative, however wacked, wheareas this one, though it has narrative cohesion, seems to leap all over the place and lack a point. Of course, maybe that is the point. The novel seemed to lack one, too. In the end, it holds together, but only just. There's a great moment when one of the production staff asks something like "why did we even decide to do this?" which is an excellent question to ask when you're three-quarters of the way through filming a movie that could turn out a total catastrophe. I must say that Winterbottom's great at traipsing along the edge. Party People came close to foundering in the frequently idolatrous treatment of Tony Wilson earlier in the film--"He doesn't care what people say about him, so long as they're talking about him." Such devil-may-care, secondhand greatness is hilariously defused later, as Tony lies in bed with his new partner and observes, "I think [Happy Mondays frontman] Shaun Ryder is on a par with W.B. Yeats," to which his partner replies, "that's interesting, because everyone else thinks he's a fucking idiot." Perfectly said and handled, although not as decisively or spectacularly as Peter Sarsgaard saved Garden State. It all comes close to tumbling but never quite does, all the way down to the very end, with Brydon and Coogan doing their Pacino impressions after the final screening.