A Film Canon

Tristram Shandy deals with essentially the same dilemma as Adaptation - how to adapt an apparently unadaptable book, in this case Laurence Sterne's notoriously experimental eighteenth-century novel - but in a considerably less lugubrious, catastrophic register. Most immediately, Winterbottom and screenwriter Martin Hardy make a film about the making of a film version of the novel, devoting the first third to the opening of the film-within-the-film, and the remainder to the shooting process itself. It's an endearingly modest metafictional gesture, and one that allows Sterne's own metafictional ingenuity to shine through, providing some support for the claim made by Steve Coogan - who plays himself, Tristram and Tristram's father, Walter - that the novel was "postmodern before there was even a modern to be post about." Whatever the broader theoretical applicability of this statement might be, it gestures towards the strange temporality of Sterne's novel - which, despite being ostensibly about the life of its titular hero, commences with his birth, and works backwards from there - and the way it comically plays to Coogan's perennial anxiety about being a character actor, rather than a leading actor. As Tristram, Coogan is both integral to the film and completely absent from it - or at least only appears once, in a shot of the inside of his mother's womb - and, while his simultaneous performance of Walter offsets this, it still doesn't allow him to become a fully-fledged character per se, instead relegating him to the strange no-man's-land of Sterne's narrator, who describes, in the first person, a life at which he is never present. It's this combination of presence and absence that allows Winterbottom to make Coogan's performance of Tristram - or, rather, Coogan's search for the role of Tristram -  continuous with his own ambient, immanent directorial style, particularly in a sequence in which Coogan wanders through the preparations for a night battle scene, crowds and fireworks dotting the background, as well as the penultimate scene, in which immanence segues into imminence, and Winterbottom presents the staging of the opening/closing birth scene. It also makes Rob Brydon - who plays himself and Toby Shandy - a fitting counterpoint, just because Coogan and Brydon's origins in celebrity impersonations and voice impressions suits them for a narrative in which characters are perpetually abstracted from their own utterances, and which, like Sterne, is fascinated with the spectrum between prosopopoeia and plagiarism, as the jumble of earlier film scores might suggest. As a result, it's never quite clear whether the direct address to camera is Coogan or Walter, whether we're experiencing the metafiction of the film-within-the-film or the metametafiction of the film itself. For all this referential complexity, it never feels tortured, partly because discussions of Sterne's novel are kept to a minimum, deflected into decisions made by the cast and crew - most of which involve excising a romance, a war scene and Gillian Anderson - as well as the opening half hour itself, which suggests that the problem isn't really how to end the film so much as how to begin it, or how to elude the constrictions of beginning and ending in the same way as Sterne. Combined with the picaresquely encyclopedic quality of the novel - surely the most difficult component to translate into cinema - it feels as if the film really needs to be seen alongside the multiple drafts referred to throughout - or as a DVD package rather than a film, as Coogan/Walter's reference to the menu of cut, extended and modified scenes makes clear, a menu that will presumably differ from DVD franchise to DVD franchise, in the same way that Sterne's work seems to solicit, invite, or at least pre-empt the quirks of each specific printing house.