Steve Coogan: I think that's the attraction. "Tristram Shandy" was a post-modern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about. So it was way ahead of its time and, in fact, for those who haven't heard of it, it was actually listed as number eight on The Observer's top 100 books of all time.
Tony Wilson: That was a chronological list.
Steve Coogan: Yeah.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Tristram Shandy, in the 18th century comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, tries to narrate to the reader the story of his life but keeps going off on tangents and sidetracks to give context and background to the things he says. So much so that he doesn't even reach his birth until Part IV, hundreds of pages in. By the end, he's covered very little of his life and none of his opinions. So it should be no surprise that in this "adaptation" of the novel, we start out in the dressing room of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon getting ready to film their parts as Tristram and his Uncle Toby, respectively. We get a half hour or so of the novel, and then the next hour mostly of the struggle to make the movie, with costume fittings, makeup, historical accuracy, personal lives, and the seeming notion that only a handful of folks have actually read the book.
Tristram's birth happens about 20 minutes into the movie, while Tristram is both narrating and playing his father. Not Steve Coogan playing the father, but Tristram, in the course of his narration, taking on the playing of his father during Tristram's birth. He also tells us of his conception, but didn't start out with it because "I thought we should wait until we knew each other better." The book never really gets around to what it sets out to do, and neither does the movie, in the best possible way. It doesn't finish adapting the book into a movie, it sidetracks into the struggle of adapting the book into a movie. It's a bit like Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze's Adaptation, in that way. But where Adaptation becomes the movie Charlie didn't want to adapt the book into, A Cock and Bull Story never really becomes a movie in the first place.
Coogan is hilarious, especially in the passive-aggressive insults he hurls at Rob Brydon. But Coogan also lends a nice weight to the dramatic parts without becoming too much. We see him struggle between his flirtation with his assistant Jennie (Naomie Harris) and the new fatherhood he's experienced with his girlfriend Jenny (the predictably wonderful, but sadly underused Kelly MacDonald), all while trying to contain a story of a recent drunken night with a stripper, and the amorphous adaptation of the novel.
The movie was made by Coogan with his 24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom, and it's a really terrific movie. It never gets too heady about its subject, the failing adaptation of an unfilmable novel nor the failing of the movie-within-a-movie adaptation of an unfilmable novel. It's funny, occasionally moving, always engaging, and ends not on a note of conclusion but on a note of ".....well, I guess that's it." before we see Brydon and Coogan hilariously arguing over the end credits after they've just watched the movie.
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