The Post About The Tristram Shandy Movie

I saw Tristram Shandy over the weekend. All in all, it was kind of what I expected - 24 Hour Party People in the 18th Century. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - Michael Winterbottom's metacinema is nothing if not entertaining. But this sort of metacinema is damned from the get-go to be "just" entertaining. Which, again, seems more like a diffusing strategy than anything else. While Winterbottom's directorial temprament - playful, involuted, bawdy - is well suited to Sterne's novel, it can't ever be as much of a headfuck as that novel, if only for the fact that without Tristram Shandy the book, Winterbottom's aesthetic and formal merry-go-round wouldn't look quite like it does.

(For anybody who's unfamiliar, Tristram Shandy is like metafiction before metafiction, or, as Steve Coogan puts it in the movie, "Postmodern before there was any modern to be post about." Part of this is owing to the fact that at the time Sterne's work was originally serialized, the novel as a form hadn't been codified yet - people didn't know what novels were "supposed to look like," exactly. The effect of this is that Tristram Shandy is probably more shocking now than it was then, as we've had two and a half centuries worth of average, formulaic stuff drilled into us, such that when we see a novel with blank pages, alternating pages of English and Latin, idiosyncratic punctuation, completely fractured narration, and a self-conscious narrator who goes well beyond the standard conventions of simply addressing the reader as such, we feel a little weird about what we think we know about artistic "progress").

So basically the film does the ol' postmodern two-step: first we're introduced to an exterior of Shandy Hall, and we see Tristram walking down a path, addressing the audience as he is prone to do. We're watching an adaptation of Tristram Shandy, a film made from the book. But then, eventually, whoa shit, we start to see what's going on behind the scenes of the very film we're watching! The third step in the two step is, of course, we're shown that step one is actually just an extension of step two. The dramatization of the novel is used pretty much to set the stage for the behind the scenes action - the nitty gritty of getting the film produced and the great comic dialogue between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing Walter Shandy / Tristram Shandy and Toby Shandy [respectively], and themselves).

The thing that makes all of this work is the lack of ambition, oddly. Undertaking the project of adapting Tristram Shandy is, in itself, incredibly ambitious. And so it seems a fitting and necessary 'fuck you' to spend most of the film following Steve Coogan obsessing over his insecurities, or the director's grappling with the producers. Much of it is very good satire - almost none of it is Sterne. It's almost as if Winterbottom was like, "Oh, Tristram Shandy's all meta, right? Well, we'll just be meta. I think I read the novel in college. I remember enough." And of course there is a running joke wherein Steve Coogan has to cover for not having read the novel - I hope I was better than that as an undergrad.

In the midst of all of this, Winterbottom inserts, I suspect a little guiltily, the faint trace of a love triangle. It's pretty well useless, except to add a bit of depth to Coogan, whose primary charm rests in his ability to seem like he's a bad actor without actually being one. Films structured like Tristram Shandy sometimes catch flack for being "indulgent" or something. Of course, we don't get off that easy, because in the film the filmmakers discuss adding in the Widow Wadman / Toby Shandy love story to beef up the film. Oh, the confluences. This is pretty much the structure of the commercial metafilm: always apologizing for its own form by capitulating to the standard narrative conceits of mainstream cinema, even while the form undercuts those conceits by pointing out that they're often added for less-than-artistic purposes. The real love story, though, is between everybody in the film and Tristram Shandy the novel. During the course of the film everybody professes their love for the book, how dedicated they are to the project they are due to the special place the novel holds for them. It's only in these moments that we see Coogan's true depth, as he's the only one who hasn't read it. His own vanity, his self-reflective insularity, prevents him from picking it up, and in his inability to do anything but quote as the film quotes (that is, in some sense, inauthentically) we can only pity him.