Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel of the life of an English gentleman has long been considered unfilmable because of Sterne’s digressions and nonlinear structure—as Steve Coogan (playing both the title role and a character named “Steve Coogan” who is starring in a film of Tristram Shandy) says, “It was postmodern before there was any ‘modern’ to be ‘post’ about.” The film-within-a-film approach of writer Frank Cottrell Boyce and director Michael Winterbottom (who co-wrote, as “Martin Hardy”) allows the two stories—Sterne’s novel and the movie being made from it—to comment on and illuminate each other: As “Tristram” finds himself shunted to the sidelines in his own autobiography, so “Coogan” becomes less and less the movie’s star. The film is complex and droll—always amusing and often hilarious.