***/****
starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, Keeley Hawes
screenplay by Martin Hardy, based on the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq. by Laurence Sterne
directed by Michael Winterbottom
by Walter Chaw This whole idea of post-modern meta-movies just doesn't thrill me the way it used to. Nonetheless, Brit maverick Michael Winterbottom's once around on the Adaptation. wheel is buoyed by a game cast and an actual purpose: rather than the impossibility of a blocked writer trying to adapt a bad novel, find here a post-modern film about a novel that predicted, in a way, post-modernism itself. Winterbottom addresses the difficulty of translating an 18th century novel concerning the vast chaos of interiority (and writing a novel within a novel); instead of turning it into a film school exercise (like Marc Forster's Stay, for instance), he allows it to become a manifestation of that insular chaos. It's the story of a tornado told as a tornado. The eye of the storm is Steve Coogan, who plays an actor named Steve Coogan (who is much like Coogan, but different) cast in the title role of Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Esq., which is directed in the film by an actor (Jeremy Northam) playing a director, with Kelly Macdonald playing his girlfriend. Or is she actually his girlfriend (and is that their kid?), or is the fact of her and their alleged child together merely a pointed echo of the action of the film-within-a-film of Walter Shandy (also Coogan) on the day of the birth of his son, Tristram? Doesn't matter. What does matter is that the conundrum is right there at the front of your head–and that the doubt is deposited with the sense of embarrassed, absurd propriety that's the hallmark of great British humor. Not so much a mindfuck as a mindlovemaking, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is delighted, like the novel, by the incapacity of art to encompass the vast incomprehensibility of life, and so it makes a piece of art that gently reminds us that there's more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in any philosophy.
