Film

A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Director: Michael Winterbottom

Movie review

From Time Out London

In 1760, one of the first reviews of Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ – in which Shandy struggles to recount the story of his own life but is constantly distracted into thematic digressions and formal trickery such as blank pages and illustrative squiggles – described it as ‘a humorous performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinct ideas to our readers’. One of the many measures of the success of Michael Winterbottom’s modified adaptation of the novel is that it’s equally difficult to describe.

After a prologue in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon – playing ‘Steve Coogan’ and ‘Rob Brydon’ – sit in a make-up trailer getting on each other’s wick, the film presents a relishably chaotic account of the novel’s first two books, in which Shandy tackles his conception and birth. Coogan’s Tristram is as chatty as Sterne’s narrator, addressing the camera (‘that is a child actor pretending to play me… the best of a bad bunch’) and playing Tristram’s self-important father Walter in flashback; Brydon is Walter’s meek, militarily-obsessed brother Toby. Then, 30 or 40 minutes in, ‘Cut!’ is called, wigs are tugged off and we pull back to see the trappings of a contemporary film production at the end of a day’s shooting, before spending a long night with ‘Steve’, negotiating his various roles as actor, celebrity, young father and helpless flirt, and the crew as they grapple with the logistics of script changes, micro-budget battle scenes and luring Gillian Anderson into a supporting part.

Like its source, ‘A Cock and Bull Story’ shows a keen but indulgent eye for the necessary absurdities of procreation, the idealism and vanity that bustle commingled around the bringing-forth of both life and art. Sterne set Walter Shandy’s fussing around his son’s birth against that son’s struggle to deliver his own story (a collision crystallised in Tristram’s refrain: ‘I am getting ahead of myself. I am not yet born’). The film’s coup is to organically extend this dynamic to its own production and beyond – into fantasy sequences and jokes based around Coogan’s public persona – making you marvel that such a film should actually make it to the screen. Witty interplay between form and content is a constant: the prologue ends with ‘Rob’ insisting that alphabetical order is ‘the only fair way’ for the credits to run; the credits promptly begin, ‘Starring (in order of appearance) Steve Coogan…’ It’s the rivalrous rapport between these two that lends the film its real heart, that makes it fun as well as clever. Whether needling each other about the size of ‘Rob’s’ role, the height of ‘Steve’s’ heels or who does the better Pacino impression, their edgy banter is both laugh-out-loud funny and wonderfully sympathetic. Along with the sarky confidences of Shandy’s narration, it ensures that what might have come off as a cold, formal experiment is also emotionally engaging, making the film an apt tribute to the novel’s warmth as well as its inventiveness. There might be self-delusion, insecurity and hubris in spades but there are no villains here.

Although its playful approach to narrative and the creative process has recent cinematic precedents – in ‘Adaptation’ and Winterbottom’s own ‘24 Hour Party People’ (in which Coogan took a similarly overarching narratorial role as Tony Wilson, who pops up here to interview ‘Steve’) – the natural home of ‘Cock and Bull…’ is the small screen. The project was initially conceived as a soap or sitcom and shares some of its effects with recent TV comedies in which the production process becomes part of the subject matter: Coogan’s Alan Partridge, Brydon’s ‘Marion and Geoff’ and ‘Director’s Commentary’, ‘Brass Eye’, ‘The Office, ‘Extras’. ‘Cock and Bull…’ would also benefit from viewing on DVD, where the ability to pause, skim or rewind has as much in common with reading as cinemagoing.

Making-of featurettes and filmmakers’ commentaries are also strikingly close to the supporting textual apparatus with which ‘Tristram Shandy’ groans; ‘Cock and Bull…’s narration explicitly mentions the DVD extras ‘which will act as footnotes to the main story’. In finding common ground between one of the earliest novels and a film poised on the cusp of interactivity, ‘Cock and Bull…’ rejects the realist approach that has flourished in between, boldly embracing the fact of authorship rather than trying to conceal it. Instead of hoping to fool us that we’re watching life itself, they constantly remind us that telling a story is a fragile, silly, impossible process, and an essential delight.

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