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| 2005 NYFF Films Introduction Good Night, and Good Luck Regular Lovers The Death of Mr. Lazarescu Methadonia L'Enfant (The Child) Bubble The Squid and the Whale I Am Capote Something Like Happiness Sympathy for Lady Vengeance Manderlay Tale of Cinema Breakfast on Pluto Through the Forest The President's Last Bang Who's Camus Anyway? Three Times Paradise Now Tristram Shandy Gabrielle The Sun The Passenger Cache (Hidden) | Tristram
Shandy Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005, 91 min.  Michael Winterbottom's movie is an Altmanesque production depicting an English crew shooting Laurence's Sterne's eccentric eigthteenth-century literary classic. It begins wittily and appropriately with Steve Coogan exchanging mocking banter with costar Rob Bryden, and then Coogan, with cosmetically enlarged and crooked nose and proper costume, becomes Shandy introducing himself. The essentials of the book are sketched in -- first of all, Tristram's meandering account of his childhood and birth (not in any logical order -- nor should they be, and intersperced with Coogan's caustic comments on the child actors playing him at earlier stages -- which perfectly fits in with Sterne's tendency to interrupt himself on the slightest pretext). Next comes Uncle Toby (Rob Briden) and his obsession with his exploits at the Battle of Naumur, which include an injury whose location he studiously avoids explicating. The mishaps surrounding Tristram's birth start with his name and move on to the forceps -- then a new device -- whose clumsy use by Dr. Slop cause the altered nose. A falling window caused even more crucial damage. The moment of birth is dwelt upon -- then the camera cuts back to the crew and the focus shifts to the Coogan-Bryden rivalry again, Steve's girlfriend and their baby, his own problems in bed, his flirtation with a pale coffee-colored crew member who's a great film buff. Coogan wants his shoes made with higher heels so he's taller than Bryden. The filmmakers hold endless confabs over how to do a battle scene and whether to bring in the romance with Widow Wadham (to be played by Gillian Anderson, who agrees from Los Angeles with comic alacrity). Anderson's presence brings in more money for the battle, and then both the battle and the romance are cut out. Much hilarity accompanies these details, though the main focus is on Coogan's stardom and inability to have a minute to himself. Unfortunately once Winterbottom pulls away from the birth scene, the Sterne novel, which pretty much ranks with Tom Jones for brilliance and humor, somewhat falls by the wayside never to be recovered till just before then end, when it seems a hasty afterthought. And hasty is one thing Steerne never is: impulsive and quirky, but never rushed. At novel's end, his main character, after all, has still not been born. Maybe it means something that only one member of the cast is reported to have read Tristram Shandy. Neither Coogan nor Bryden seems eighteenth-century in their role, and Toby isn't Toby. Nobody is amiably eccentric to the right degree. Winterbottom has made an intermittently funny movie that never loses its pace, but he has recreated Robert Altman rather than Laurence Sterne, and when you realize this, if you care at all about the novel, the whole enterprise, despite its frantic enegy, becomes a bit of a drag. This is an enormously clever film, but what seems clever on paper doesn't always play for keeps. (Chris Knipp) |
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