Michael Winterbottom is a good director who sometimes makes films that are more interesting to analyze in an auteurist survey than to watch. Tristram Shandy is one of those, occasionally clever but basically another filmmaker’s obligatory movie about making movies.
For many, the genre is a reliable source of genial, that’s-showbiz humor. But reading Laurence Sterne’s hootenanny of a book you can’t help but think that no mainstream movie could be made that would do it justice, and that Winterbottom’s biggest accomplishment was selling his idea successfully at all. So, fine, compromise: Steve Coogan plays his usual put-upon post-post-ironic voice, wears period nose, chats with producers, bollocks’ up his marriage. Throughout, the milieus shuffle playfully between the 21st-century set and the 18th-century story. Fellow Brit comic Rob Brydon upstages Coogan even more than he’s supposed to, but so be it.
The weakness in Winterbottom’s take is how he reinterprets the self-consciousness of the novel’s narrator. It would be sufficient to have anonymous actors and personnel call attention to the act of filmmaking and story-telling. But Winterbottom mistakenly inserts the added, hackneyed layer of Coogan et al being “stars” and recognizing themselves as such. The result is winky in-joking that’s not so distinct from what star culture consists of anyway. Coogan may be the latest and best at convincing us of his ill ease with his persona, but the approach was far more successful and funnier in the queer meta-existence of his character in 24-Hour Party People.
Winterbottom’s always at least a little interesting, but reading Tristram in front of a running DVD of Alan Partridge might make for a more adventuresome experience.
Opens January 27 at Angelika Film Center
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