Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

What a shame it is that the only exposure the average American has to Steve Coogan is in his over-the-top, cartoonish persona as evidenced in Tropic Thunder (where his appearance was mercifully cut brief) and Hamlet 2. Those who have a taste for British comedy, however, know the real Coogan, a comic performer of supreme talent whose Alan Partridge occupies a part of the Holy Trinity of Britcom Characters with Basil Fawlty and David Brent. While his American roles seem to take his gift for Peter Sellers-esque mimickry and expand them too far beyond the realm of believability, back home he can contain his mania enough to wring some damn fine satire out of goofballs.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story marks Coogan's second feature with director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce; his first, 24 Hour Party People, sent up the Manchester music scene with fourth-wall-breaking self-reflexivity. All the more appropriate, then, that they should choose for their second collaboration to adapt The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a comic faux-autobiography that deviates into digressions and asides more often that it stays on-topic. Fittingly, their adaptation spends more time focusing on the making of the film than it does with anything involving Tristram Shandy.

If you want a capsule review, here's as basic as it gets: take Adaptation and replace the cast with British comic heavyweights. But where Charlie Kaufman used metafiction to probe the anxiety of writer's block, Coogan and co. use their "unfilmable" novel to comment on the vain politics of movie sets and the British film industry in relation to Hollywood. Coogan is set to star in the title role of the period piece, but he enters into a bizarre sort of warfare with co-star Rob Brydon as the constant re-writes shift the majority of screen time to and from each of the leads.

Brydon and Coogan play these office politics fairly straight, but the nature of the film allows them to inject more "actorly" performances into what appear to be fly-on-the-wall moments. Brydon, almost completely unknown in the States, proves an able foil for Coogan's self-absorbed version of himself: where Coogan is trying to parlay his television success into a film career as Shandy, Brydon acts the dope, always nervous to be surrounded by some of England's finest talent even as he demonstrates a subtle understanding of the game an actor must play on-set. In one of the film's funniest recurring gags, Brydon amuses the crew with his impression of Coogan which, to Coogan's mounting frustration, isn't even an impersonation of him but of his Alan Partridge character, the character he's trying to get away from with the film.

For a script that calls for such madcap plot distortion, Tristram Shandy has a remarkable feel for such character moments. Coogan is so wrapped up in the stress of the shoot, his power struggle with Brydon and the added strain of having a baby that he can't indulge in any passion for his wife Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), but he has more than enough libido to woo, um, Jennie (Naomie Harris). Jennie is attractive, yes, but so is Jenny, and Harris plays Jennie as a cineaste several leagues beyond Coogan in an understanding of the craft. She has a Fassbinder obsession, which a clueless Coogan tries to exploit as a connection, and it almost works: shes asks him what his favorite Fassbinder film is, then mentions Schatten Der Engel. "Is that the one with all the sex?" Coogan asks her (as well as the five people in any theater who might understand just how hilarious that line is in the context of Fassbinder's oeuvre). Other characters pop up here and there, fully developed or deliciously warped visions of their real selves, all of whom perpetuate the stereotypes of behind-the-scenes egomania even as they bring their own quirks to the roles.

If the film has any major flaw, it's that it spends so little time with the actual Tristram Shandy aspect of the story. As unfilmable as the novel may have been, the early scenes, wherein Coogan's Shandy narrates his birth -- there's even a production snafu involving placing Coogan inside of a mock womb to make the narration that much more absurd -- and criticizes the child actor who plays his young self (within the film-within-a-film's diegetic world where the kid can hear him). It's a shame that, after spending nearly 20 minutes in Shandy's birth scene, a serious depiction of the agony of childbirth protracted until it morphs into a belly-aching "Simpsons rake gag" piece of brilliance that repeats something so far beyond any possible moment of humor until it suddenly becomes funnier than ever.

I didn't know what to expect from Tristram Shandy before I popped it in my DVD player. Having become so accustomed to Coogan only shining in minor roles, even cameos, as of late, I feared that he might fail as the lead. Have no fear: this is Coogan in top form, with a script that scores at least one laugh per scene and a supporting cast filled with talented stars such as renaissance man and my own personal man crush Stephen Fry to Gillian Anderson, who sparks off uproarious asides as her introduction solves all of the production woes (the British backers suddenly agree to finance everything when an American actress, who had hit a post-X Files dry spell at the time, is added to the cast) as well as driving the fantasies of the cast and crew, all of whom turn out to be big fans of Agent Scully. I don't if I can agree with Stephen Fry's character when he proclaims the whole thing "a cock and bull tale, the finest of its kind I've ever heard," but Tristram Shandy is so stuffed to the gills with in-jokes, metajokes, and just plain surface-level comedy that I'll be coming back for more in the near future.