Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

I’ve never read the book (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) and probably never will. Someone in the movie describes it as “A postmodernist novel from before the time there was any modern to be post about.” It was written and published between 1759 and 1769, in nine volumes, and it has been generally agreed that it is unfilmable. Apparently, by the end of the book Tristam is just being born, so he never really gets around to telling his life story.

Which is fine, and Michael Winterbottom certainly hasn’t tried. He uses some scenes from the book, mostly of Tristam being born, to make a “Making Of” movie, sort of, though it’s hard to pin this movie down as being anything at all … which I guess is the point. Real actors use their real names (“We can get Gillian Anderson!” “From ‘Baywatch’?” “No, Agent Mulder.” “No, Scully.”) but you have to believe they’re jiving, because if they were really as egotistic and vain and massively insecure as they portray themselves to be … they never would have played themselves that way. If you get my drift.

There’s all sorts of things I could ruminate about, from the “fourth wall” to metafiction to deconstruction, lots of comparisons I could make to films like Being John Malkovich, but I’m too tired. It was funny, I had quite a few laughs, but never really felt like I was getting the point. And maybe that was the point.