"Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"

This wonderfully absurd adaptation of the classic novel isn't afraid to laugh at itself -- and you'll laugh at it too.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Jan. 27, 2006 | Being a lover of the classics is such a humorless gig, particularly when it comes to movie adaptations of great books. Late last year, the Jane Austen Society, as well as many plain old Jane Austen fans, dipped Joe Wright's lively "Pride & Prejudice" into their home test kits and found its Austenticity lacking: The country dance was too noisy and undignified, the characters took unforgivable liberties with the book's dialogue, and too much of the story happened outdoors. The ending seen in American theaters, in which Lizzy and Darcy actually kiss, was the last straw; in Austen's world, characters never kissed, even, apparently, in private.

The terrible and beautiful thing about adaptations of great books is that they're always intruders, invading our already crowded imaginations and demanding a little space of their own. But their audaciousness is often mistaken for a kind of overwrite capability, a demonic code written expressly to erase (and not just accessorize) the joyful and intensely private experience of reading. How much power we cede to a movie adaptation of a beloved book is up to us, not it, and yet we can't help seeing a "failed" adaptation as the dangerous enemy of everything we hold dear.

As an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th century comic novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," Michael Winterbottom's "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is surely a failure, considering that less than a third of the movie even deals with scenes from the novel. But as an attempt to wrestle with the intricacies of adaptation -- and as a way of facing up, with good humor and humility, to the reality that no matter how much integrity you bring to the task, you're bound to mess up -- it may be the most honest kind of adaptation imaginable. "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is, among other things, a movie-within-a-movie, a sly meditation on the haphazard, unpredictable nature of creativity, and an affectionate cuff on the nose for actors everywhere, exposing, in good fun, their vanity, insecurities and tendency toward jealousy. The movie's delights unfold like an intricate, exotic puzzle: Winterbottom has built a detailed, miniature universe inside a sugar egg.

Sterne's novel is largely considered unfilmable, and by the time we see the actor who's playing the title character here (an actor named "Steve Coogan" --who's played by the actor Steve Coogan) hanging upside-down in an oversize facsimile of a womb -- complete with a realistically spongy-looking pinky-red interior -- we understand why. I confess, with a degree of shame, that I've never read "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman," but if you haven't, either, we're not alone: One of the running gags of "A Cock and Bull Story" is that nearly no one on the set of the movie-within-a-movie has read it, either. (At one point, Coogan thumbs through a copy, desperately looking for a scene he's been told is crucial, grumbling, "Can you believe a book as thick as this doesn't have an index?") Sterne's novel is, as Coogan explains to a journalist in the movie, a groundbreaking work -- "a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be 'post' about," he says, summing it up nicely. The book includes a whole page that's nothing but black space, as well as some intricate typography effects and illustrative squiggles. It's a story told in digressions and rambling asides, and that's exactly how Winterbottom has structured the movie, too. Although it may seem formless at first, there's really a ramshackle rigorousness to it.

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