November 7, 2005

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

directed by Michael Winterbottom
screenplay by Martin Hardy
after the novel by Laurence Sterne (1759-1767)

After finishing the book just recently, obviously I had to see this.

With adaptations the question is always “is it a good adaptation?” This means: does the movie fulfill whatever fantasies are called to mind by the phrase “movie version of Tristram Shandy?” In this case I think that the answer is almost entirely yes. The main things I would want from a movie version of Tristram Shandy: visualizations of the characters and locations, and reenactments of some of the funny dialogue. Definitely there. My one reservation would be that the overall 18th-century “look” was just the same natural-light on-location-at-a-manor-house stuff that I’ve seen on PBS so many times, and the various actors never exactly disappeared into the parts, so I didn’t quite get that full feeling that I was getting to see it really happen. I just got the feeling that I was seeing a very charming performance of it. But that was good enough. Given the film-within-a-film construction (about which more in just a second), that kind of remove was probably appropriate (and/or inevitable).

Let me be clear: you get to see all kinds of stuff from the book that you’d want to see: the siege of Namur, Uncle Toby whistling Lillabullero, a slideshow of famous men with long noses, etc. etc. A good part of the long scene with Toby, Walter Shandy, and Dr. Slop preparing for Tristram’s birth is included, but what takes 100 pages in the book is here only a few seconds – as you might imagine – and I ended up worrying that as a result, a lot of the fairly absurd dialogue, quickly delivered, was probably flying over the heads of the audience members who hadn’t read the book. And I think that might have been the case. This movie is certainly going to be more satisfying to those who read the book first. But my moviegoing companion, who had not read the book, thoroughly enjoyed the movie, even though she said that she did indeed feel a little removed from it at the beginning.

So far, I have only been talking about the beginning. If you’ve read anything about this movie, you already know that it’s an adaptation in the Adaptation sense – after a little while, the movie veers off into meta-movie land and thereafter only returns to Tristram Shandy for brief interludes. The movie is, in fact, mostly about Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan), the lead actor in a movie version of Tristram Shandy. Yup, it’s one of those. But the lovely thing is that, just as in Adaptation, the movie-about-a-movie still has claim to being an adaptation of the source material, which itself is more concerned with “the making of” than it is with telling a story. Just as in the book, the meta- play is partly meant to get at philosophical issues of the interactions between life and its own representation, and partly just for fun.

In fact, as far as layering goes, the movie complicates things well beyond the book. The PBS-ish movie-within-the-movie is itself a playful affair, wherein adult Tristram walks into a scene of his childhood and complains that the child representing him is not playing the part correctly, etc. If carried out throughout, THAT movie could well have stood alone as a complete representation of the complexities of the book. But then the “real” actors are added on top of that, and then finally at the end we see the “real” real actors coming out of a screening room where they seem to have watched the meta-movie itself. I was reminded of, yes, The Muppet Movie, which is a movie about a bunch of characters in a screening room watching a movie about themselves wherein they come to Hollywood and make a movie about themselves. A similar kind of playfulness here, though it obviously creates a different emotional effect. It’s also worth saying that it creates a different emotional effect from the comparatively claustrophobic Adaptation.

The whole movie is played very mildly, emotionally low-key (just like actual on-set documentaries and, indeed, most real social life), and yet in a few key places flirts tastefully with having sentimental content. I thought this was exactly in keeping with Sterne’s worldview. That’s the other thing I would want from an adaptation of Tristram Shandy – something that captured that particular feeling of how the world is both delightfully and distressingly frivolous. A good deal of the screen time is taken up by chatty British humor and some Christopher Guest-ish deadpan character comedy, but the construction, and the grounding of Tristram Shandy, make it all add up to more than that as a whole. It’s really a sort of portrait of an everyman type, this Steve Coogan/Tristram Shandy/Laurence Sterne guy, a self-centered guy not entirely sure what is worth wanting, trying to figure out what kind of order can possibly be imposed on life. The closest thing to a dramatic plot involves him flirting with a production runner named Jennie while his girlfriend Jenny is visiting the set with their baby, and even that is played as low to the ground as possible.

It’s actually quite remarkable to me, thinking back on it, that a balance was struck that made all these elements seem to cohere and serve a worthy thematic purpose. I can see a thousand ways that a movie like this could have fallen apart at the seams. But somehow it all just felt right – so natural almost as to seem slight, while I was watching it. My appreciation for it has, I think, grown in retrospect.

Music was all borrowed from other movies, including several cues by Michael Nyman, whose smart/stupid classical/minimal style, which often rubs me the wrong way, was here exactly right.

I do however think that the title is ungainly, though I understand how they ended up with it (the movie being neither Tristram Shandy nor NOT Tristram Shandy).

I saw this at the New York Film Festival screening (which, at time of writing, is pretty much the only thing mentioned on the movie’s official website) and so Michael Winterbottom, the two leads, and some downplayed dude (I believe it was producer Andrew Eaton) came up on stage for a little Q & A thingy afterward. Actually, they first showed themselves when they stood up from box seats to receive applause, and I thought “Whoa, did they just watch their own movie so that they could listen to our response?” I think I would have found myself laughing louder had I known. My understanding was that after the first couple showings, filmmakers didn’t do that. Though I suppose that this was probably only the 20th showing, or something, so perhaps they weren’t quite completely fed up with it yet.

The Q’s were, as always, fairly embarrassing. It must be some kind of principle of self-selection at work – Q & A session questions seem always to be either 1) eccentric and/or ornery, 2) not questions, or 3) questions that have already been answered. In 2000 I saw Woody Allen give what was being promoted as a “rare” Q & A session to promote Small Time Crooks, during which he was 1) asked where he got the glasses that appeared in one character’s apartment (A: I don’t know) and 2) badly told one of his own jokes from his stand-up act of 35 years ago (A: Yeah). I wish there was a 3) so that I could round this out, but I don’t recall any more; I just remember cringing through the whole thing.

For Tristram, the ornery question came from a guy who asked “This obviously wasn’t the book, why didn’t you just film the book?” and then when given the expected answer, pressed the question again with obvious irritation, and then grumbled audibly when the director wrapped up his second version of the answer. The 2) non-question came from a woman who told everyone what she thought the “womb” sequence meant. The moderator did her the favor of turning this around in his on-mike rephrase, as “basically, what was the meaning of the womb sequence?”

At this point, it occurred to me that I had a question to ask, so I raised my hand, and got called on, but as I started to speak I was cut off by some guy shouting out 3) a question that had already been answered. Namely, were any scenes actually improvised? The moderator had started things off by asking that very question. The answer, by the way, is pretty much, “just the obviously-improvised silly conversations that bookend the movie.”

Then I finally got my chance. I’m leading up to this like my asking a question was a big event, but, well, for me it was. For those three seconds, I ran the risk of annoying everyone in Alice Tully Hall, not to mention some minor celebrities whose movie I had just seen. For a non-famous, non-performing-in-Alice-Tully-Hall guy like me, having that many ears on you at once is a rare occasion, and primitive social-structure instincts come to the foreground. It’s hard to fight that inner law of conformity that says: When there are 700 people present, you will not call undue attention to yourself. So, sad to say, that sort of moment feels significant both before and after, even though it adds up to nothing.

Well, it does add up to my getting an answer from Michael Winterbottom, so, in order to turn my moment of glory into a public service, and also to hopefully exorcise the moment from my brain, where I keep running over it (apparently just to be really really sure that I did not make a 700-person faux pas, which I obviously did not) – I offer you the exchange in its entirety, as best I can remember it:

Me: How do you see the Jenny character as relating to the original book?

Moderator: The question is how the character of Jenny as she appears in the movie compares to the character from the book. I guess that’s a question for Michael.

Beth: (to me, quietly, during the pause) There are two. [i.e. there are two characters named Jenny in the movie, so my question is perhaps ambiguous]

Me: (full voice) Either one, really.

[I then proceed to be distracted from the answer because I worry that it sounded like I was saying that the question could be directed to “either one” of the men on stage – though there are four – and that maybe saying “either” about four men made me sound crazy and people are annoyed with me, just as I have been annoyed with pretty much everyone to ask a question thus far]

Winterbottom: Well, Jenny in the book is his wife* and Tristram is really writing it all to her. She doesn’t actually appear, but there are these sort of apostrophes to her scattered through the book. When Sterne wrote the book he was just a parish priest, he wasn’t famous at all, and then the book was a huge success [he said some other stuff here, while my mind was racing distractedly] and he would leave his wife at his house in Sutton-in-the-Forest**, and he took a place in London and began to spend all his time in high society. And he dealt with a lot of the same issues that would come up for a celebrity today. So there are connections there, just not necessarily to the book.

I had asked because I felt like the sad/creepy possibility of romantic unfaithfulness that hung over the character in the movie was not really something that showed up in the world of the novel, and I wondered whether they had intended it as extrapolation from or contrast to the book. But it makes some sense that it both seemed foreign to the book and yet was intended as relevant to Sterne’s own life – his unfaithfulness to his own wife was apparently a blind spot for him. Here’s a related dumb anecdote that has been reprinted in several places. For all I know it’s completely apocryphal:

Sterne, who used his wife very ill, was one day talking to Garrick in a fine sentimental manner, in praise of conjugal love and fidelity. “The husband,” said Sterne, “who behaves unkindly to his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head.” “If you think so,” said Garrick, “I hope your house is insured.”

Garrick = David Garrick (1717-1779), actor, playwright, theater producer.

* Apparently, though not necessarily. In fact, Shandy ends one chapter by pointing out that we are jumping to conclusions if we simply make the obvious assumption that she is his wife.

** Of course, I don’t actually remember him saying that, but that’s where Sterne lived, and I trust that Winterbottom got it right.

Post a comment

Your email address will not be published.