A Cock and Bull Story: Michael Winterbottom

Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy is a novel about the impossibility of writing a novel. So it makes sense that a movie adaptation would be about the impossibility of making a movie. That’s exactly what Michael Winterbottom did with A Cock and Bull Story (2005), his “adaptation” of Sterne’s 18th century masterwork. The film follows a disastrous attempt to adapt the novel into a lavish costume drama. But various difficulties keep popping up—casting difficulties, creative differences, incompetently (and expensively) shot battle sequences that prove completely unusable in the final cut. At the center of it all is Steve Coogan playing a caricature of himself as a vain actor playing Stern’s titular role. During the first fifteen or so minutes which recreate the four early traumas of Tristram’s life—his “disturbed” inception, the smashing of his newborn nose, his inauspicious naming, his accidental circumcision by falling window-pane (don’t ask)—Coogan’s character acts as an omnipresent narrator who actually gets into arguments with the various figures populating the story. These scenes are brilliantly executed and get the chaotic rhythm of Sterne’s non-chronological storytelling down perfectly. They even preserve one of my favorite unspoken jokes in the book: Tristram’s male relatives merrily talking about nonsense for an hour and nonchalantly testing out the accursed forceps that would crush his infant nose all the while happily oblivious to the shrieks of his mother going through labor in the room right above them. But after the birth scene the production gets stalled and we enter “real” life as Coogan and his co-stars try to figure out what the bloody hell is happening to their movie. From there the film loses quite a bit of steam, feeling at times an improvised directionless mess. Sometimes the result is brilliant, such as a historical reenactor of eighteenth century warfare brought in to coordinate the battle scenes whose meticulousness mimics the obsessiveness of Sterne’s Uncle Toby. There’s also a brilliant bit of business about casting American actress Gillian Anderson at the last minute as Uncle Toby’s amour, the Widow Wadman. But too much of the film centers around not-Coogan’s abortive relationship with his personal assistant Jennie (Naomie Harris), a film buff who—unlike almost everyone else—has actually read and understood Sterne’s novel. Put bluntly, this affair is tedious and uninteresting. A Cock and Bull Story is an admirable effort, but an ultimately disappointing one.

Rating: 6/10