Vanity Fare
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Vanity Fare Putting Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece on film. by JOHN PODHORETZ It is fitting that a picaresque 18th-century masterpiece as defiantly singular as Laurence Sterne's Tristram...
...In the movie, the adult Tristram appears only as a narrator struggling to advance his own life story past his journey through the birth canal...
...But nothing Coogan does can prevent the movie-within-a-movie from being taken over by Rob Brydon— who isn't even trying to take it over...
...In the book, Tristram is so distracted by his digressions that he can't even get himself born until Volume Four...
...His vanity is stung by the growing importance of the novel's Uncle Toby character, especially since the part is played by his friend and nemesis, fellow comedian Rob Brydon...
...Sterne let his febrile imagination loose on the page in an endlessly amusing, wildly confusing work of free association—a work that stands as a portrait of the capacious sensibility that created it...
...And yet Coogan does an indelible job of capturing the pathos at the center of Sterne's comic vision...
...The problem is that Coogan hasn't actually bothered to read Tristram Shandy—which is a notoriously difficult book, after all—and so doesn't realize that the love story doesn't involve Tristram at all but rather Brydon's character, Uncle Toby...
...As A Cock and Bull Story progresses, Coogan begins to fear, and with good reason, that he is not actually the star of the movie...
...Just as Tristram wants to be the hero of his own tale, but is continually frustrated because he can never quite get to the center and stay there, so it is with Steve Coogan...
...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...by JOHN PODHORETZ It is fitting that a picaresque 18th-century masterpiece as defiantly singular as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy should serve as the wellspring of a singular 21st century cinematic wonder called Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story...
...Sterne's novel is an endless series of variations on a single theme: Human existence is an incoherent tumult, and no man's life can be accurately or honestly converted into a clean, linear narrative...
...Rather, they decided to try and capture the hilariously digressive experience of reading the book...
...When a battle sequence featuring Uncle Toby unexpectedly becomes the movie's centerpiece, Coogan contrives to get a love story from the book inserted into the film...
...One minute Coogan is meeting with the producers, and in the next he's trying on costumes before he has to run off and flatter a journalist whose paper wants to publish an embarrassing article about him at a strip club...
...Coogan does everything he can to cut Brydon down to size, including literally demanding that Brydon's shoes be redesigned so that Coogan can tower over him...
...Michael Winterbottom's joyous new movie is an amazingly successful effort to capture the sensibility of Sterne's endless jape in a film only 94 minutes long...
...As we watch his film, we discover that Winterbottom and his writing colleague Frank Cottrell Boyce (whose joint screenplay is credited to Michael Hardy) wisely have no intention of adapting Tristram Shandy to the screen...
...Meanwhile, his girlfriend and newborn baby are upstairs in his suite while he flirts with a cute assistant who nearly bores him and everyone else to death with long speeches about the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder...
...In A Cock and Bull Story, it's Winterbottom's Tristram, Steve Coogan, who is running a million miles a minute, unable to focus on any single thing...
...To achieve this end, they have come up with a terrific trick: Most of the movie is actually about the making of a Tristram Shandy movie, starring and narrated by the amazing British TV comedian Steve Coogan...
...Winterbottom translates a series of scenes from the novel to film— scenes in which Tristram attempts to tell the story of his own birth, but keeps getting waylaid by extraneous details about his father's life, his parents' marriage, and his Uncle Toby's obsessive reenactment of the battle in which his manhood was compromised...
...After all, who hasn't, at some point, shared Coogan's (and Tristram's) sense that we are not the heroes of our own lives but rather merely supporting players in somebody else's drama—a drama that God, for a reason we cannot fathom, finds more interesting...
...No performer since Jack Benny has been this funny playing himself as an overstuffed popinjay...
...Winterbottom is the most casually and comfortably literate of contemporary filmmakers, with two impressive (and depressing) Thomas Hardy adaptations to his name: 1996's Jude and 2000's The Claim, which cleverly transposes The Mayor of Casterbridge to an American mining town during the Gold Rush...
...Sterne gave the world a peerless portrait of how a man's mind works, how it runs a million miles a minute and enjoys endless regressions and digressions...
...So when the bombshell American actress Gillian Anderson (of The X Files) gets cast as the romantic interest, it's Brydon who gets the screen time and gets to live out his life's fantasy of getting it on with Agent Scully...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 21
